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  • Deconstructing International Politics by Michael Dillon
  • Nicholas Onuf
Michael Dillon, Deconstructing International Politics. London: Routledge, 2013. 213pp. $42.94 paper, $130.00 hardcover.

Michael Dillon’s collection of nine essays, originally published from 1989 to 2008, has much to say about deconstruction and much less, at least directly, about international politics. The book’s freshly written introduction (chapter 1) immediately confirms Dillon’s great debt to Jacques Derrida. Dillon takes a few pages to explain Derrida’s philosophy of presence, absence, and supplementarity and to show how deconstruction works as a critical method. He sees himself as a long-term apprentice of Derrida’s way of thinking and intends the essays as increasingly sophisticated applications to contemporary security issues. Material added to the early essays accustoms readers to Derrida’s, and Dillon’s, demanding prose and arcane argumentative procedures.

Chapter 2 starts with a brief discussion of modernity’s onset and genealogy, with appropriate acknowledgment of Michel Foucault’s influence. The tone shifts when Dillon undertakes a deconstruction of deterrence in relation to Cold War nuclear strategy. He avoids all talk about a supposed “logic” of deterrence that presupposes rational assessment of the consequences of choosing, for example, not to follow the rules of a modern municipal legal order. He might have pointed out that strategic interaction makes all such consequences doubly indeterminate, that nuclear weapons are destructive beyond meaningful calculation, and that a proportionate response to others’ acts is therefore no longer possible.

Instead he holds deterrence to deconstruct itself, thus revealing irrationality to be its supplementary “other” and making it discursively useful in an ever-changing political practice. Moreover, he holds the “discourse of deterrence” to be “a paradigm of the deconstruction that is latent in all modern forms of reasoning” (p. 33). Even if nuclear deterrence is a discourse that paradoxically defeats and sustains itself, it does not follow that the logic of deterrence fails the test of rationality.

Chapter 3 considers Derrida’s well-known claim that the act of signing a text simultaneously grants and defers “presence” both to whatever the text designates and to its signer. After a brief discussion of constitutional documents, Dillon turns his attention to the title page of an obscure document recording a minor treaty between Australia and Korea (reproduced on p. 50). At the top of the page is Australia’s great seal, [End Page 210] which he calls “a dense historiographical signature” (p. 49) that makes anyone who reads it complicit in an unending process of state-making. Running down the page, he comments on a series of signifiers, only to make a serious error when he comes to “Subsidiary Agreement.”

Dillon calls this agreement a “promise,” and thus a speech act with an illocutionary force further substantiated by reciprocity. Not so. As the text’s title page says, but Dillon fails to notice, the agreement entered “into force” on a specified date, and it did so as a treaty with the force of international law. We know this because the last signifier on the page says “Treaty Series 1984, No. 19.” Not reading to the bottom, Dillon overlooks the mass of speech acts resulting in legal obligations simultaneously and continuously constituting states as such and regulating their relations.

The next three chapters turn to matters of justice. Also much discussed among cosmopolitan ethicists, the plight of the refugee in modern societies is Dillon’s focus. The first chapter in this suite assesses the ontological disorientation affecting refugees and their hosts, but has less to say about Derrida’s engagement with Emmanuel Levinas on duties to others than one might have guessed. The second draws on Derrida’s influential conception of hospitality. The third takes up the question of distributive justice, briefly introduced in the preceding chapter. Dillon seems to think that community membership is the only necessary criterion for distributive justice; some readers may think this an unduly limiting perspective.

Chapter 7 is a highly original contribution to the current fashion for bodies and embodiment in social theory. The immediate subject is the impact of the information revolution on military strategy, exemplified by a well-known RAND Corporation report and illustrated with snippets from a...

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