derrida kritik

7/21/2019 Derrida Kritik

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Derrida K

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Rule-based ethics sacrifice justice – upholding your responsibility to one other

always comes at the cost of the other others.

Derrida 92 (Jacques, director of studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Gift ofDeath, p.67-69)But isn't this also the most common thing? what the most cursory examination of the concept of responsibility cannot fail to affirm?Duty or responsibility binds me to the other , to the other as other, and ties me in my absolute singularity to the other asother. God is the name of the absolute other as other and as unique (the God of Abraham defined as the one and unique). As soon as I

enter into a relation with the absolute other, my absolute singrilarity.enters into relation with his on the level of obligation and duty. Iam responsible to the other as other, I answer to him and I answer for what I do before him. But of course, what binds me thus in

my singularity to the absolute singularity of the other , immediately propels me into the space or risk of absolute

sacrifice . There are also others, an infinite number of them, the innumerable generality of others to whom I should be bound by the same responsibility, a general and universal responsibility (what Kicrkegaard calls the ethical order). I cannot

respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another without sacrificing the other other, the

other others . Every other (one) is every (bit) other [tout autre est tout autre], every one else is completely or wholly other. The

simple concepts of alterity and of singularity constitute the concept of duty as much as that of responsibility. As a result, theconcept of responsibility, of decision, or of duty, are condemned a priori to paradox, scandal, and aporia.Paradox, scandal, and aporia are themselves nothing other than sacrifice, the revelation of conceptual thinking at its limit, at its deathand finitude. As soon as I enter into a relation with the other , with the gaze, look, request, love, command, or call of the

other, I know that 1 can respond only sacrificing ethics, that is, by sacrificing whatever obliges me to also

respond, in the same way, in the same instant, to all the others . I offer a gift of death, I betray, I don‟t need to raise myknife over my son on Mount Moriah for that. Day and night, at every instant, on all the Mount Moriahs of this world, I am doing that,raising my knife over what I love and must love, over those to whom I owe absolute fidelity, incommensurably. Abraham is faithful toGod only in his absolute treachery, in the betrayal of his own and of the uniqueness of each on of them, exemplified here in his only

beloved son. He would not be able to opt for figelity to his own, or to his son, unless he were to betray the absolute other: God, if youwish. ¶ Let us not look for examples, there would be too many of them at every step we took. By preferring my work, simply by givingmy time and attention, by preferring my activity as a citizen or as a professorial and professional philosopher, writing and speakinghere in a public language, French in my case, I am perhaps fulfilling my duty. But I am sacrificing and betraying at every moment allmy other obligations: my obligations to the other others whom I know or don‟t know, the billions of my fellows (without mentioningthe animals that are even more other others than my fellows), my fellows who are dying of starvation or sickness. I betray my fidelityor my obligations to other citizens, to those who don‟t speak my language and to whom I neither speak nor respond, to each of thosewho listen or read, and to whom I neither respond nor address myself in the proper manner, that is, in a singular manner (this for theso-called public space to which I sacrifice my so-called private space, thus also to those I love in private, my own, my family, my son,each of whom is the only son I sacrifice to the other, every one being sacrificed to every one else in this land of Moriah that is ourhabitat every second of every day). ¶ This is not just a figure of style or an effect of rhetoric. According to 2 Chronicles, 3 and 8, the

place where this occurs, where the sacrifice of Abraham or of Isaac (and it is the sacrifice of both of them, it is the gift of death onemakes to the other in putting oneself to death, mortifying oneself in order to make a gift of this death as a sacrificial offering to God)

takes place, this place where death is given or offered, is the place where Solomon decided to build the House of the Lord inJerusalem, also the place where God appeared to Solomon‟s father, David. However, it is also the place where the grand Mosque of

Jerusalem stood, the place called the Dome of the Rock near the grand Aksa mosque where the sacrifice of Ibrahim is supposed tohave taken place and from where Muhammad mounted his horse for paradise after his death. It is just above the destroyed temple ofJerusalem and the Wailing Wall, not far from the Way of the Cross. It is therefore a holy place but also a place that is in dispute,radically and rabidly, fought over by all the monotheisms, by all the religions of the unique and transcendent God, of the absoluteother. These three monotheisms fight over it, it is useless to deny this in terms of some wide-eyed ecumenism, they make war with fireand blood, have always done so and all the more fiercely today, each claiming its particular perspective on this place and claiming anoriginal historical and political interpretation of Messianism and of the sacrifice of Isaac. The reading, interpretation, and tradition ofthe sacrifice of Isaac are themselves sites of blood, holocaustic sacrifice. Isaac‟s sacrifice continues every day. Countless machines of

death wage a war that has no front. There is no front between responsibility and irresponsibility but only between



different appropriations of the same sacrifice , different orders of responsibility, different other orders :

the religious and the ethical, the religious and the ethico-political, the theological and the political, and so on; the secret and the public,the profane and the sacred, the specific and the generic, the human and the nonhuman. Sacrificial war rages not only among thereligions of the Book and the races of Abraham that expressly refer to the sacrifice of Isaac, Abraham or Ibrahim, but between themand the rest of the starving world, within the immense majority of humankind and even those living (not to mention the others, dead ornonliving, dead or not yet born) who don‟t belong to the people of Abraham or Ibrahim, all those others to whom the names of

Abraham and Ibrahim have never meant anything because such names don‟t conform or correspond to anything. ¶ I can respond

only to the one (or to the One), that is, to the other, by sacrificing that one to the other. I am responsible to any one (that is to say to any other) only by failing in my responsibilities to all the others, to the ethical or political generality.

And I can never justify this sacrifice, I must always hold my peace about it. Whether I want to or not, I can never justify thefact that I prefer or sacrifice any one (any other) to the other. I will always be secretive, held to secrecy in respect for this, for I havenothing to say about it. What binds me to singularities, to this one or that one, male or female, rather than that one or this

one, remains finally unjustifiable as the infinite sacrifice I make at each moment . Those singularities represent

others, a wholly other form of alterity: one other or some other persons, but also places, animals, languages. How would you ever justify the fact that you sacrifice all the cats in the world to the cat that you feed at home every morning for years, whereas other catsdie of hunger at every instant? Not to mention other people? How would you justify your presence here speaking one particularlanguage, rather than there speaking to others in another language. And yet we also do our duty by behaving thus. There is nolanguage, no reason, no generality or mediation to justify this ultimate responsibility which leads me to absolute sacr ifice; absolutesacrifice that is not the sacrifice of irresponsibility on the altar of responsibility, but the sacrifice of the most imperative duty (thatwhich binds me to the other as a singularity in general) in favor of another absolutely imperative duty bind me to every other.

Vote negative to embrace a system of ethics predicated on contingency and

calculation – rule-based morality authorizes complicity in the worst injustices.

Derrida 2 (Jacques, director of studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, “Force of

Law: The „Mystical Foundation of Authority,‟” Acts of Religion, p. 257-8)This excess of justice over law and calculation, this overflowing of the unpresentable over the determinable, cannot andshould not [ne peut pas et ne doit pas] serve as an alibi for staying out of juridico-political battles, within an

institution or a state, between institutions or states. Abandoned to itself, the incalculable and giving [donatrice] idea of justice is always very close to the bad, even to the worst for it can always be reappropriated by the most perverse calculation. It is always possible, and this is part of the madness of which we were speaking. An absolute assurance

against this risk can only saturate or suture the opening of the call to justice, a call that is always wounded. But incalculable

justice commands calculation . And first of all, closest to what one associates with justice, namely, law, the juridical field

that one cannot isolate within sure frontiers, but also in all the fields from which one cannot separate it, which intervene in it and areno longer simply fields: the ethical, the political, the economical, the psycho-sociological, the philosophical, the literary, etc. Notonly must one [il fautJ calculate, negotiate the relation between the calculable and the incalculable, and

negotiate without a rule that would not have to be reinvented there where we are "thrown," there where we find ourselves; but onemust [ilfaut] do so and take it as far as possible, beyond the place we find ourselves and beyond the already identifiablezones of morality, politics, or law, beyond the distinctions between national and international, public and private, and so on. The orderof this il faut does not properly belong either to justice or to law. It only belongs to either realm by exceeding each one in the directionof the other-which means that, in their very heterogeneity, these two orders are undissociable: de facto and de jure [ en fait et en droit]. Politicization, for example, is interminable even if it cannot and should not ever be total . To keep this from being atruism, or a triviality, one must recognize in it the following consequence: each advance in politicization obliges one to reconsider,and so to reinterpret the very foundations of law such as they had previously been calculated or delimited. This was true for

example in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, in the abolition of slavery, in all the emancipatory battles that remain

and will have to remain in progress, everywhere in the world, for men and for women. Nothing seems to me lessoutdated than the classical emancipatory ideal. One cannot attempt to disqualify it today, whether crudely or

with sophistication, without at least some thoughtlessness and without forming the worst complicities . It is true that it is

also necessary to re-elaborate, without renouncing, the concept of emancipation, enfranchisement, or liberationwhile taking into account the strange structures we have been describing. But beyond these identified territories of juridico-

politicization, on the grand geo-political scale, beyond all self-serving misappropropriations and hijackings, beyond all determinedand particular reappropriations of international law, other areas must constantly open up that can at first resemble secondary ormarginal areas. This marginality also signifies that a violence, even a terrorism and other forms of hostage taking are at work. Theexamples closest to us would be found in the area of laws [ loisJ on the teaching and practice of languages, the legitimization ofcanons, the military use of scientific research, abortion, euthanasia, problems of organ transplant, extra-uterine conception, bio-engineering, medical experimentation, the "social treatment" of AIDS, the macro- or micro-politics of drugs, homelessness, and so on,without forgetting, of course, the treatment of what one calls animal life, the immense question of socalled animality. On this last



problem, the Benjamin text that I am coming to now shows that its author was not deaf or insensitive to it, even if his propositions onthis subject remain quite obscure or traditional.

Extensions

Refusing calculation enables massive violence in the name of “justice”. We must

calculate with the incalculable.

Miller 8 (J. Hillis, Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California at Irvine, “Derrida's

Politics of Autoimmunity,” Discourse, Volume 30, Numbers 1 & 2, Winter & Spring, Muse) (3) The context of the passage I have cited is the distinction Derrida draws between law and justice. To act lawfully is not to act [EndPage 215] justly. Preexisting laws preprogram decision and act, for example a judge's decision in a court of law, whereas justice isalways new, inaugural, and unheard of. A just judge remakes the laws in every just judgment, because he or she acts in response to theuniqueness and singularity of each case. Justice is a response to what Derrida calls "the wholly other." That means justice is"incalculable." It resists rational calculation either beforehand or after the fact. Justice is an example of that resistance tocognition I spoke of a moment ago as fundamental to Derrida's thinking and action. No one and nothing, no general command, tells

him he must allow that African immigrant in Paris to use his address, nor that he should feed and take care of one single cat out of allthe others that are dying of hunger every day, to cite a somewhat scandalous example Derrida gives.4 Since justice is"incalculable," that means that it can easily be appropriated by the bad or the worst. A bad person can alwayssay, I acted unlawfully because the "wholly other" commanded me to do so and so. I claim I actedaccording to a higher justice. This means that " incalculable justice requires us to calculate," in order totry to avoid the bad or the worst, totalitarianism, fascism, some unjust authoritarian regime claimingsovereignty. Calculating in this case means, I think, measuring what we do against that "classicalemancipatory ideal." It also means, I think, calculating as best we can what will be the actual practical effect,for example of new laws about stem-cell research, something that in its novelty and promise does not fit earlier paradigms of medicalresearch. Derrida stresses that we get no help in doing this from preexisting laws. We are forced to remake thevery foundations of law: "[E]ach advance in politicization obliges one to reconsider, and so to reinterpret, the very foundationsof law such as they had previously been calculated or delimited." Moreover, since what Derrida calls "destinerrance," as I shallexplain further later on, means that we can never anticipate just what will be the results of our political choices and decis ions, such as

passing new laws, our calculations about the incalculable are always risky and dangerous. Nevertheless, a

decision is demanded of us. Derrida stresses the urgency and immediacy of the obligation to decide . I mustdecide, now, even though I never have enough information to make my decision and act anything other than a more or less completeleap in the dark, as when I propose marriage to this one woman out of all the other possible ones.

derrida kritik

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