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Description
Seeking to comment on the critical legacy of Jacques Derrida, this essay examines Derrida's addition of a post-scriptum to his 1989 essay "First Name of Benjamin," suggesting that the tension between the text's formal body and its supplement is itself an argument for the value of formal risk and critical hesitation that raises the stakes of conventional criticism.
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Perhaps it is somewhat hasty to move directly to a post-script, but this is where I would like to begin. Jacques Derrida's 1989 essay "Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority" is comprised of two smaller, if still lengthy, essays: "Of the Right to Justice/From Law to Justice" and "First Name of Benjamin." The former essay was first presented as a keynote address at a conference at the Cardozo Law School; the latter was distributed as a companion to that keynote, handed out to participants but not read aloud. Both essays concern the questions of law and justice; in fact, the second may be considered something of a demonstration of the first. In "Of the Right to Justice," Derrida identifies justice as an axiom that is unknowable and yet calls unceasingly; in "First Name of Benjamin," he seeks to do justice with, or to, the work of Walter Benjamin, agreeing with and expanding Benjamin's 1921 essay "Critique of Violence." One year later, at a University of California-Los Angles conference entitled "Nazism and the 'Final Solution': Probing the Limits of Representation," Derrida returned to this second essay, adding a "prolegomena" and a "post-scriptum," and reading the extended essay aloud as a second keynote address. These additions--a new introduction and new conclusion--are much more than simple elaborations. In fact, the critical gesture of these supplementary sections appears to stand in stark contrast to the rest of the piece, offering a dramatically altered reading of Benjamin's text. Surprisingly, Derrida chose to leave the body of his essay unchanged, resulting in a tension between the essay itself and the later additions--a tension that comes to a head in a small phrase used early in his post-scriptum, a phrase that I will argue offers one means of understanding Derrida's legacy. After an initial paragraph explaining why it would be a mistake to read Benjamin's 1921 essay in light of the "Final Solution" that took place in the Second World War, he begins his second paragraph as follows: "And yet. Yet, in a certain way, I will do just that" (294). And yet, he writes, full stop. Yet ... It is the gesture of this phrase, couched within the context of these essays, that I want to discuss today.
Surely one of the most oft-repeated phrases about Jacques Derrida is that his work is well-neigh impossible to summarize. It seems that if one wants to know Derrida's thought, there is nothing to be done but to read his texts. Nonetheless, we have gathered here to contemplate what Derrida's legacy in the field of criticism might be, and if, on such an occasion, one sought to offer a comment on Derrida's entire project and process, to say a few words to some forty years of his critical thought, one could do worse than the phrase and yet. This and yet indicates an agreement with a condition, a supplement; it is itself already a type of post-scriptum. It promises not a destruction but a deconstruction, suggests that what we have is not sufficient, and warns that we are not fully in control, that we have not taken everything into account. It speaks to a hesitation that can be found in nearly all of Derrida's work, asking us to slow down, to pause, to reconsider. He followed Husserl, one might say, but would have to add and yet; Heidegger ... and yet; Hegel ... and yet; Marx, Levinas ... and yet, and yet. He has used terms like "justice," "responsibility," "democracy," and "language," but always added and yet. What might be at stake in a legacy of the and yet?
In order to properly understand the surprising structure of Derrida's "Force of Law," perhaps a quick overview of Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" is in order. At first glance, what stands out in the essay is its orthodoxy: unlike so much of Benjamin's work, "Critique of Violence" includes no enigmatic titles, no staccato theses, no prolonged digressions. Indeed, there is even a plodding and methodical argument, beginning with the essay's central move, in which Benjamin steps back from considering the legitimacy of violence in specific cases to the question of whether violence itself can ever be considered just. For such a project, he argues that neither natural law (which suggests that the justness of ends guarantees the justness of means) nor positive law (which suggests that just means will always produce just ends) is sufficient; such arguments, he reasons, are part of a tautological logic of means and ends used by the political state to justify its monopoly on violence. Since "the most elementary relationship within any legal system is that of ends to means," he looks for a space outside the structure of both positive legal philosophy and natural law, wherein he might consider acts of violence "within the sphere of means themselves, without regard for the ends in which they serve" (277).
In his search for a place "outside," Benjamin notes that the legal authority of the state hinges on a distinction that exists between "founding violence" and "preserving violence"; the authority of the state is established by an originary act of great violence that is considered separate and distinct from all the state's other acts of violence, and which is meant to preserve its authority. Such a distinction cannot hold, he argues, for any moment of "founding violence" always, by definition, seeks to dominate, authorize, and preside over the moments to come, and, as such, always anticipates its preservation, just as it is always echoed and reiterated in the every act of "preserving violence." Benjamin argues that this co-contamination of authorizing violences means the state exists in a condition of decay, always allowing for the very... |
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