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Article Excerpt
The Heart of the City
"Listen first to those who, like myself, did not have to watch TV to know that SOME of L.A. was burning," Derrida wrote to a newsletter in response to the riots triggered by the Rodney King events in 1992, adding, "L.A. is not anywhere, but it is a singular organization of the experience of 'anywhere'" ("Faxitexture" 28). At a time when one hardly needs to watch TV to know that many cities around the world are burning, or are targeted and wounded, bombed and invaded--as if the Biblical injunction, "Then ye shall appoint you cities to be cities of refuge for you" had turned against itself, or had suspended itself, thereby converting cities of refuge into sites of intense hostility--it would be pertinent to recall the many illuminating texts Derrida has composed on cities and how deconstruction is inextricably related to burning, cinders, ashes, ruins, haunting, dissemination and destruction, and at the same time to rebuilding, inheriting, maintaining (maintenant), opening, reconstructing and welcoming. At the same time, it is precisely his evocation of the city as a place of refuge modeled after a certain messianicity, if not messianism, that exposes his own texts to a rigorous rethinking and critique. A number of fascinating readings have been done on Derrida's concept of hospitality, yet hardly anything has been written on the theme of the city in Derrida, even though it is not difficult to see that for Derrida cities represent what his seminar on hospitality calls the very "structures of welcoming [les structures de l'accueil]" (Acts of Religion 361). After looking closely at the direct as well as oblique references to cities which traverse Derrida's work like traces that radically erase themselves while presenting themselves, it would not be an exaggeration to claim that one has not quite approached deconstruction if one has not yet visited Derrida's concept of the city. It should be recalled that Derrida in Dissemination refers to a radical anteriority explicitly in terms of the city when he talks about a tower that "occupies a place before 'me,'" and like a sentence that awaits me, keeps watch over me and "surveys my heart's core--which is precisely a city, a labyrinthine one" (341, italics added).
On the one hand Derrida's city is split--like Jean-Luc Nancy's "heart," which Nancy says does not exist before the break, for "it is the break itself that makes a heart" (99)--into the tower and the labyrinth, whose destiny is decided by the tower. On the other hand, however, the "heart," which is one of the most recurring themes in Derrida, and which he characterizes by using "city" as a trope, ironically evokes unicity, even an essence. The oneness or ipseity of the heart in Derrida becomes obvious when, in The Gift of Death, he prophesies that the future belongs to the heart insofar as the heart is "a place of treasures," the treasures to come, treasures one saves "beyond the economy of the terrestrial visible or sensible," or the priceless treasures of the "celestial capital" (98). In "Che cos'e la poesia?" Derrida returns to this theme to argue that poetry is a dictation from the other that is lost "in anonymity, between city and nature"; and the secret of this dictation from the other that remains im-presentable can only be learned by heart (223). A poem, Derrida continues, is "what teaches the heart, invents the heart" but the invention that causes the heart beat lies "beyond oppositions, beyond outside and inside" (231). Again, in For What Tomorrow, Derrida evokes the "heart" while analyzing the problem of sovereign monopoly over the death penalty, arguing for the unconditional abolition of the death penalty both for reasons of principle (rather than utility or inutility) and for reasons of the heart (89-90), as if the reasons of the heart had been deployed to counter the reasons of the head, or in other words, sovereignty as being "head" of the State.
Contrary to Henri Lefebvre's critique that deconstruction and poststructuralism conceptualize space as merely a mental thing or a mental place (Production 3-4), the question of the city brings deconstruction to the "ground realities," by foregrounding the political dimension of Derrida's thinking. For instance, Derrida's text, On the Name, examines Plato's concept of khora, in which Derrida interprets khora not as a mental space but as a shifting receptacle that makes a city go outside of itself or exposes it to the other as if the memory of one's city had been imprinted by "the secretariat of another city" (114, 118). A city, which is at once more than one and less than one, insofar as it subsists only by going outside of itself towards the other, is not merely the houses, the monuments and the habitat, or to put it otherwise, is not something that can be calculated in terms of its monuments; instead it is the polis where all political decisions are made, a site where all historical events take place and an event that makes the arrival of the other possible. In fact, for Derrida a city embodies the figure of the other itself, the other which, with its visitation that exceeds all expectations, opens itself as hospitality. The city in Derrida functions almost in the same way as does language in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, whose concept of hospitality to the Other--as seen especially in his remarks in Totality and Infinity that "the essence of language is friendship and hospitality" (305)--provides Derrida an important point of departure for his own concept of cosmopolitan hospitality.
It is precisely Derrida's concept of the city of refuge grounded on the law of incalculable or unconditional hospitality to the other or on the principle of the heart--which is not a normative principle, not even a quasi-normative one--which provides a vantage point to show how Derrida's project of the city of refuge is conditioned by a number of theoretical constraints. I will point out at least four areas--not only to continue with the spatial metaphor but also to suggest that Derrida's cosmopolitics of the city eventually culminates in the politics of "areas" in which one area is posited over against the rest--each inextricably related to the other and yet unique, which register and reveal these constraints. The first is his notion of tradition or heritage that determines both the conditions of the inheritance and the question of who inherits it. The second area is Derrida's characterization of the arrival of the other without which neither hospitality nor any event would be possible: on close inspection, the way in which the other's arrival is theorized as an unconditional visitation, as opposed to an arrival by invitation, reveals that Derrida's notion of the unconditional itself belongs to a discourse that is already conditioned by a set of invariables. The messianic event of the arrival of the other is the third area that conditions Derrida's concept of the unconditionally hospitable city. Although distinguished from messianism, this concept nonetheless unmistakably evokes theology, albeit a negative one, thereby bringing, as if in a loop, Derrida's critique of sovereignty back to the onto-theological tradition from which he wants to distinguish his principle of the heart or the messiani-city. And finally, the last area in which a constraint can be identified is the centrality of Derrida's notion of the "other" Europe in his references to cities, which interestingly revives a universalist project of the new Europe in spite of his assurance that this "other" Europe is not limited to any fixed borders, or that it is in the process of constant making and remaking, thereby turning these Europeans "at once youthful and fired of [their] age" (The Other 7).
All of these constraints that condition Derrida's unconditional hospitality eventually bear on the question of sovereignty, and I claim that Derrida's project of the city of refuge fails to theorize the other of sovereignty, for it is already conditioned by the sovereignty of the other. By the other of sovereignty I do not mean, as if following a path paved by Foucault in Society Must Be Defended, that "we have to bypass or get around the problem of sovereignty" (27). Bypassing sovereignty would be impossible, as Derrida cautions in Rouges, because evading it would threaten "the classical principles of freedom and self-determination" (158). Derrida indeed handles the question of sovereignty with more subtlety than does Foucault with the latter's impatient bypassing. Against the classical conceptualization of sovereignty as expressed so volubly and indivisibly, for instance, in the Leviathan, where Hobbes argues that whether sovereignty resides in one as in monarchy, or in many as in autocracy, or in all as in democracy, sovereignty requires that they must have it entirely (123), or in Bodin's On Sovereignty where sovereignty is defined as an absolute and perpetual power of the prince that cannot be transferred in any other ways than as an unconditional gift (8), Derrida maintains that sovereignty should remain at once indivisible yet to be shared. Nevertheless, the question persists as to the nature of this sharing (partage), for it is also the unconditional gift of sovereignty that constitutes the law of the unconditional in Derrida; and the whole deconstruction of the classical notion of sovereignty seems merely to reverse the order of the sovereign. Instead of claiming the sovereignty of the self, or ipseity, Derrida seems to revert it to the sovereignty of the other. The circular wheel of sovereignty that receives a measured pounding in the first chapter of Rouges--where Derrida adroitly exposes the circularity of sovereignty as "a rounding off" by the self, or as a turn (tours) around the self (12)--only comes full circle in order to reaffirm the unicity of the heart of the city.
Derrida's project of the city in general and, in particular, that of the city of refuge, which he sketches out in his address to the International Parliament of Writers in Strasbourg in 1996 (later published in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness), is a pertinent site for pursuing this reversal because these projects seem--against his express wish not to put forward any plan or proposition, and to strictly maintain "the essential poverty of [his] work" ("Hospitality" 74)--to chart out an ambitious plan for a network of cities of asylum for victims of state persecution. The Cities of Asylum network, established under the auspices of the International Parliament of Writers, of which Derrida was a founding member and vice president, is not a utopic vision. As we are informed by Christian Salmon in the first issue of the Parliament's Journal, Autodafe, the Parliament convened in haste after the assassination of Tahar Djaout in Algeria in 1993, and Salman Rushdie and Wole Soyinka were its first two presidents. And from the...
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