프랑스철학비판 : 프랑스어 솰라솰라

Signature, event, context에 대한 글 (context event politics - jonathan blair - capital class)

 

   The French philosopher J. Derrida is most well known for instituting the school, or method, known as deconstruction, whereby one...interprets? No, critiques? No, challenges? Perhaps, changes? Maybe, performs? Certainly. Performs what? Justice? Was Derrida, then, a political philosopher, and deconstruction a political philosophy? Many readers of Derrida see what they call a political "turn" in his work near the end of the 1980s or early 1990s, when the content dealt with within that period and after was that of traditionally "political" themes (justice, law, friendship, immigration, etc.). But what makes a work, or thinker, political? I will argue that it is not merely a matter of theme or content, but rather the work's transformative capacity. That is, not only the normative critique it offers, but also a form or structure whereby something new can be brought into being, and thereby alter the pre-existing situation. Thus, a political work is never a mere hermeneutic exercie, an unmasking of what is, whether in terms of the powers that be, the flow of history, or the structure of being, but rather the transformation of what is.

 

   So, is Derrida a political thinker? Did he take a political turn (Left or Right?) according to the above criteria? The answer that I will attempt to demonstrate in this paper is : Yes, Derrida does take a political turn in his thought, thus becoming a genuine political philosopher. However, what I want to argue is that this turn does not come in the 1980s or 90s, nor is it the product of a change of focus to different themes; but rather it is clearly present in the early 1970s (1971, to be specific) with the writing of his essay "Signature, Event, Content." This essay's confrontation with the concepts of language and context, and its reconceiving of the concept of the performative, as found in Austin's work, enabled Derrida to accept the socio-historical situatedness of all events while maintaining their novely, their transformational power. As well, one consequence of this turn was the blurring of the distinction interpretation/change: to write is to act; to interpret is to change. Thus, even before his work on explicitly political themes, Derrida's work was political in its creative intervention of how we think what is. This paper will primarily focus on "SEC" as well as Derrida's later "political" essay "Force of law," demonstrating how the former structures the latter based on the conception of performativity and the law of iterability.

 

How does the new come into being? This is the question; and I would argue the only truly political question, or rather, the condition of any and every political question. This does not mean, simply, what causes or produces what effects, for the belief in determinable cause and effect, as the fundamental explanation of what is conceived as change, would be a belief in a form of fatalism, and the end of the political (and moral, for that matter). This is what leads Kant to proclaim in the Groundwork that, although all phenomena – as they are a priori conditioned by the category of causation – take the form of necessity, of the predetermined, freedom – if it were to exist – had to be separate from the phenomenal realm of cause and effect, and could therefore only be a matter of faith. And this was a faith necessary in oreder to make any sort of "ought" claims. Following this, there is a twofold consequence of the question of the new being the fundamental political question: 1) freedom in the form of the question of agency, not in the simplistic form of Left versus Right, is the fundamental normative, and thus political, problem(at least for political thought, as it is often assumed or dismissed in most "practical" work in politics). AGENCY : how does the new come into being, as if from nowhere, without predeterminable cause, or, in other words, a theory of the EVENT. 2) this mode of thinking implies a critique, at least as a starting point, for a science of politics, taking science in its modern or traditional (non-Kuhnian) conception as description or explanation of what is, but at least somewhat creates it as such, naturalizing the normative model of the describing subject. This is the standard, and fairly convincing, critique of the neutrality or objectivity of scientific and political observation or theory, particulary leveled aganist the liberal ideal of a political system that aims/claims to be purely non-normative but rather merely a matter of calculation. On the other hand "political science" abounds (political economy, political behaviorism, "New Public Management," etc), hence another critique of this mode of thought does not seem superfluous.

 

In treating politics as a science, in attempting to describe or explain the "what is" of politics, the "facts," in a systemically closed causal fashion, one essentially shuts the door to change, at least in the form of the unprecedented and unpredictable. (There would of course be change in the form of "progress" toward an inevitable goal or telos, but the truly new, that which falls outside the causal system, would be negated or ignored.) This clousure happens in two ways typically:either in the form of conservatism of the current, or recently past, status quo(현상), as exemplified by the infamous saying of Margaret Thatcher, "There is no alternative." Or, in the form of a dogmatic teleological belief system, however radical or progressive it may appear: for example, a belief in an inevitable course of history, or a higher life after this one. Neither postion allows for the truly novel, an unexpected event that ruptures the closed system of our perceptions, engendering wholly other conceptions of our immanent reality. Thus, any study of polics instead becomes, "How do we find agency, or define the event, in an era that is 'incredulous' to any possible metaphysical One or Actor, whether it be the centered Self or the movement of World History?" (This is also, I would argue given the space, the question and motivation of poststructuralism in general, which is wholly political.) Derrida seems to be attempting an answer to this question by analyzing certain conditions of language.

 

In 1955 Austin delivered the William James Lectures at Harvard University, and these lectures were subsequently turned into the small but immensely influential book <How to do things with words.> In this book, which was to form the jumping-off point for speech act theory in Anglo-American philosophy, Austin explores the strange yet prevalent occurence where to say something is not simply to assert or communicate a state of affairs but to "do it." He names an occurence of this kind "a performative utterance or, for short, 'a performative'." These utterances are not merely doing something in the trivial sense that speech itself is an act which affects its listeners in some way. Rather, these acts do something more: they actually create the world they purport to describe. (At this point in analytic philosophy, an era ruled by positivism and behaviorism, many theorists felt that language had a purely descriptive role, even if this was a description of thought-content.) Austin gives many examples of what he calls explicit performatives, such as a judge finding a person guilty; an official naming a boat; and a couple saying "I do" in a marriage ceremony:

 

[In these examples it seems clear that to utter the sentence (in, of course, the appropriate circumstances) is not to DESCRIBE my doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it. None of the utterances cited is either true or false: I assert this as obvious and do not argue it. It needs argument no more than that "damn" is not true or false : it may be that the utteranve "serves to inform you" – but that is quite different... when I say, before the registrar or altar. &c.., "I do," I am not reporting on a marriage : I am indulging in it.]

 

As the lectures progress, the distinction between performatives and non-performatives (called "constatives") becomes increasingly blurry, all statements seeming to be performatives to some extent. As well, austin continually points out that performatives are not subject to the categories of truth and falsity, but instead to some other type of force, which is somehow tied up with context and authority. However, though they cannot be false, strictly speaking, they can fail – or be infelicitous, to use Austin's phrase – eliciting a certain type of "nonsense." In fact, Austin, after a preliminary listing of different cases of infelicity, tells us that infelicity, or failure, is an inherent part of all acts dependent on convention for their force: "Well, it seems clear in the first place that, although it has excited us (or failed to excite us) in connextion with certain acts which are or are in part acts of UTTERING WORD, infelicity is an ill to which ALL acts are heir which have the general character of ritual or ceremonial, all CONVENTIONAL acts." However, he then moves on, pushing aside this fact, in order to attempt to find and describe what the law of the "pure" performative may be, only to finish his lectures doubting whether such a thing as the pure performative exists, leaving these final musings(사색) for what he calls a "general theory" of speech acts (Austin only having dealt with a "special theory" that distinguishes between performatives and constatives).

 

In 1971 at a conference on "Communication" in Montreal, Derrida first presented an essay entitled "SEC." This paper continued Derrida's earlier work, his attack on "Logocentricism," or the traditional system of dichotomies that make up the Western metaphysical heritage, particulary from the perspective of the subordination of writing to speech, writing as language's other. However, and this is the thesis of my essay, "SEC" not only continued his work but became a foundational point for all his subsequent work, particulary those labeled by his commentators as "political." There are several reasons for this view of "SEC" : 1) it was a rare explicit engagement with the Anglo-American philosophy of language; 2) it marks a decisive critique of what I will simply call "historicism," by which I mean, following Alain Badiou, "the temporaliztion of the concept," a mode of thinking that confines concepts strictly within their temporal and spatial (socio-historical) situation. This type of "historicism," prominent in much of contemporary thought, seems always to lead to some form of ultimate cynicism or sophism (which has the same flaws as the fatalist view discussed previously); 3) the critique of historicism is also an explicit separation of Derrida's work from that of hermeneutics, freeing "deconstruction" to be more than mere "unmasking" of the power relations that be; which leads to the 4) and final aspect for us, the formulation of the LAW OF ITERABIILITY at the heart of the performative, and of all language in general (all sign-systems), which allows deconstruction to become an interventionist philosophy, a philosophy of the event, and thus political. It is the second and fourth of these that are of interest here and which I will now discuss.

 

The main issue at stake in "SEC" is that of CONTEXT. After briefly discussing some general traditional conceptions of language, e.g., as the communication of thought-content, Derrida moves on to question of whether a context can ever be determined or saturated:

[(A)re the conditions of a context ever absolutely determinable? This is, fundamentally, the most general question that I shall endeavor to elaborate. Is there a rigorous and scientific concept of CONTEXT? Or does the notion of context not conceal, behind a certain confusion, philosophical presuppositions of a very determinate nature? Stating it in the most summary manner possible, I shall try to demonstrate why a context is never absolutely determinable, or rather, why its determination can never be entirely certain or saturated.]

 

Derrida then proceeds to show this through a particular piece of work on language by Condillac. In that work, writing is considered a special form of language because of its ability to function in the absence of the original sender(and receiver). But, Derrida asks, is not this absence the very structural possibility of writing:

[One writes in order to communicate something to those who are absent. The absence of the sender, of the receiver, from the mark that he abandons, and which cuts itself off from him and continues to produce effects independently of his presence and the present actuality of his intentions, indeed even after his death, his absence, which moreover belongs to the structure of all writing.]

 

Writing as the system of absences works as part of Derrida's original project of critiquing what he calls the metaphysics of presence, the tradition of Western thought in which speech is always the epitome of language, language as presence (of sender, receiver, meaning, thought, etc.)

 

“SEC" then performs a double movement, leading to one of the controversial main conclusions of the paper. First and of the utmost importance, Derrida shows that the ability to function in the radical absence of any sender or intended receiver, and thus any verifiable intention of meaning, the predicate of writing, is possible because of the repeatability of the signs, their ITERABILITY or CITATIONALITY:

 

[In order for my "written communication" to retain its function as writing, i.e., its readability, it must remain readable despite the absolute disappearance of any receiver, determined in general. My communication must be repeatable – iterable – in the absolute absence of the receiver or of any empirically determinable collectivity of receivers. Such iterability – (ITER, again, probably comes from ITARA, other in Sanskrit, and Everything that follows can be read as a working out of the logic that ties repetition to alterity) structures the mark of writing itself, no matter what particular type of writing is involved.]

 

It is this iterabiility that forms the IDENTITY of the sign within a system or code, that which identiated from the other marks forming the system. (Is absence here being separated from difference?) This iterabiility allows the written sign to "continue to act" after its removal from the original situation in which it was written. In fact, it is this possibility that allows one to cite, to put the words into quatation marks, and thus to forcefully take them out of their original situation, grafting them on to a new one. Hence, iterabiility has the dual quality of allowing for the repture of the old situation/orgin and the transformation of the meaning of the very signs that have been displaced, through the possibility of the graft:

 

[A written sign carries with it a force that breaks with its context. That is, with the collectivity of presences organizing the moment of its inscription. This breaking force is not an accidental predicate but the very structure of the written text... By virtue of its essential iterability, a written syntagma can always be detached from the chain in which it is inserted or given without causing it to lose all possibility of functioning, if not all possibility of "communicating," precisely. One can perhaps come to recognize other possibilities in it by inscribing it or GARFTINg it onto other chains. No context can entirely enclose it. Nor any code, the code here being both the possibility or writing, of its essential iterability (repetition/alterity)].

 

The second movement comes as Derrida goes on to show that this iterabiility, this citationality is in no way unique to writing as traditionally understood, but rather is the structural possibility of all language, and all experience for that matter:

 

[Are these predicates not to be found in all languages, in spken language for instance, and ultimately in the totality of "experience" insofar as it is inseparable from this field of the mark, which is to say, from the network of effacement and of difference, of units of iterability, which are separable from their internal and external context and also from themselves, inasmuch as the very iterability which constituted their identity does not permit them ever to be a unity that is identical to itself?]

 

The unique aspect of writing, absence, seems to permeate all systems of signs, whether oral or ritualistic, thus making writing, that lesser entity in the history of Western thought, the structural possibility of all other "field[s] of the mark"; absence, and therefor iterability, coditions presence:

[This structural possibility of being weaned from the referent or from the signified (hence from communication and from its context) seems to me to make every mark, including those which are oral, a grapheme in general; which is to say, as we have seen, the nonpresent REMAINDER of a differential mark cut off from its putative "production" or orgin. And I shall even extend this law to all "experience" in general if it is conceded that there is no experience consisting of PURE presence but only of chains of differential marks.]

 

Taking these two points together, Derrida moves on to his dramatic and controversial conclusion: the essence of language, so to speak, is not its ability to transfer or communicate meaning within a given context or situation. It is, rather the Possibility Of Its Being Taken Out of Context, its ability to create new meanings by repeating certain signs in the absence of their original context, meaning or intention:

 

[This is the possibility on which I want to insist: the possibility of disengagement and citational graft which belongs to the structure of every mark, spoken or written, and which constitutes every mark in writing before and outside of every horizon of semio-linguistic communication...Every sign linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written... in a small or large unit, can be CITED, put between quotation marks; in so doing it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts without any center or absolute anchorage. This citationality, this duplication or duplicity, this iterability of the mark is neither an accident or an anomaly, it is that (normal/abnormal) without which a mark could not even have a function called "normal." What would a mark be that could not be cited? Or one whose origins would not get lost along the way?]

 

And, it is this critique of context as determining, in the final analysis, of the meaning of a situation, its "truth", which is also a critique of the historicist and hermeneutic position. For, if the possibility of all signs lies in their ability to break with any given context, then to confine the meaning or "truth" of a given chain of marks (such as, for example, the multitude of those in the canon centered around justice), to its local, contextual origin, let alone the attempt to get to the mark's truth through a study of original context, is to misunderstand the nature of the mark. The mark, a sign, is not just an effect but is creative, productive, in its essential possibility of being taken out of its original context. It is, so to speak, force without signification(의미), transhistoric force originating within history, or a UNIVERSAL, in the sense given to it by Badiou:"Only what is in immanent exception is universal." But how does the force to rupture and create contexts work, how does a historically situated sign become a rupturing event? This is now the question, as well as the point at which we return to the concept of the Performative.

 

Why, when he has thus far been working with very "continental" concepts, does Derrida switch to engage so explicitly with Anglo-American philosophy, in the form of Austin? He gives 4 preliminary reason's for bringing Ausin's theory of the performative in at this point in "SEC" : (1) its reliance, according to Austin (and his French translator) on a determined, or "total," context for success; (2) its break from traditional conceptions of language as communicating a "thought-content." Instead, what the performative communicates "would be tantamount to communicating a force through the impetus of a mark"; (3) the complete lack of referent proceeding or outside of the occurrence of the performative utterance. Rather, the performative does not describe something outside or before itself, it "produces or transforms the situation, it effects," and this is "its manifest function or destination"; (4) finally, the freeing of the analysis of the performative utterance from the "authority or the truth value, from the ture/false opposition," again, substituting in its place the value of a force. All in all, what Derrida appears to see in the "discovery" of the performative is the perfectly adapted tool to allow for a theory of transformation/action, one that accepts the premise that we are necessarily historically and culturally situated (culture being, at least assumed so here, a system of signs). There is no "God's eye view" that can dictate a path outside of the one we are on, true, but the view we have still allows for agency, the possibility of the "new", and in such a way that can be meaningful outside and beyond its own socio-historical situation.

 

That being said, however, the performative as Derrida finds it in Ausin's work is still an inherently conserving or descriptive theory. This is owing to the first aspect of the performative mentioned above: its reliance on a total context for success, and thus as the basis for analysis. (For one could imagine, after the thorough completion of such an analysis, being able to move back from the occurrence of the performative to the necessary determined context in which it originated.) As we have already seen, Derrida critiques the possibility of a total or determinable context, a context within which an utterance could be confined. And he recognizes within Austin a movement toward this very critique. However, and this will be what Derrida deconstructs in Austin's work, Austin needs this conception of a determined context because of his focus on the Successful Or Pure perfomative. Austin's analysis attempts to exclude what he calls Infelicitous perfomative – unsuccessful, impure, or filed perfomative utterances – in order to try to isolate the perfomative's nature. What Derrida then proceeds to do, in typical fashion, is to demonstrate that what Austin excludes from his analysis as secondary or subordinate is actually the structural possibility of iterabiility as secondary to the nature of the perfomative, the ability to remove it from its original context.:

 

[For, ultimtely, isn't it true that what Austin excludes as anomaly, exception, "non-serious," Citation (on stage, in a poem, or a soliloquy) is the determined modification of a general citationality – or rather, a general iterability – without which there would not even be a "successful" performative? So that – a paradoxical but unavoidable conclusion – a successful performative is necessarily an "impure" performative, to adopt the word advanced later on by Austin when he acknowleges that there is no "pure" performative.]

 

In other words, it is failure, not success, which seems to be the more interesting and more essential aspect of the perfomative.

 

Derrida, of course, recognizes that there are perfomatives that succeed all the time. These are important to take account of in one's analysis. However, what he is opposing is the opposition between seemingly pure occurrences, or events, of speech (speech acts), and citations, non-serious parasitic doubles of the true acts. Moreover, as both acts, the pure and the impure, rely on the structure of iterabiility – the very thing that allows for the non-serious cases – events can never be truly pure, as if they were not themselves repetitions. We are now dealing directly with what brings about the new, the event, what "concerns the status of events in general." As the event, as mark, is necessarily marked by iterabiility, its origin can no longer be seen as outside the situation ("a miracle from above") but always comes from within, the outside-within, is always immanent to the situation, necessitating a new way of thinking the event in general: "Rather than oppose citation or iteration to the noniteration of an event, one ought to construct a differential typology of forms of iteration... At that point, we will be dealing with different kinds of marks or chains of iterable marks and not with an opposition between citational utterances, on the one hand, and singular and original event-utterances, on the other." And, if we focus only on those acts which "succeed," we have only a repetition, or reproduction of the SAME, a repetition that excludes alterity, whereas we have already seen that by iteration Derrida sees the Conjunction of Repetition and Alterity. It is only with those events that fail, through a contextual disengagement, an inherent structural possibility, that we gain rupture or displacement of the system, engendering a new situation, necessarily unforeseeable under the "rules" of the old one: "It is this displacement, this reinscription, that alone is capable of giving us a history, not the eternal return of the same but a repetition in difference, a tradition that is indeed programmed from the very start, and programmed even in its modes of reception, but that has programmed within 'moments' that escape all programs – in other words, the 'possibility' of an EVENT." We have the possibility of Founding something, of begining, again.

This is the task set for deconstruction. It is not a mere unmasking of what is, it is not merely a form of "hermeneutic deciphering, the decoding of a meaning or truth." Rather, deconstruction intervenes in a system and changes it, creating something new:

 

[Deconstruction cannot be restricted or immediately pass to a neutralization : it must, through a double gesture, a double science, a double writing – put into practice a REVERSAL of the classical opposition AND a general DISPLACEMENT of the system. It is on that condition alone that deconstruction will provide the means of INTERVENING in the field of oppositions it criticizes and that is also a field of nondiscursive forces. Every concept, moreover, belongs to a systematic chain and constitutes in itself a system of predicates... Deconstruction does not consist in moving from one concept to another, but in reversing and displacing a conceptual order as well as the nonconceptual order with which it is articulated... It is those predicates (I have recalled several of them) whose force of generality, generalization, and generativity is liberated, grafted onto a "new" concept of writing that corresponds as well to what has always RESISTED the prior organization of forces.]

 

As I will now move on to briefly show, this foreshadows and makes possible Derrida's later "political" works, in particular the infamous assertion "Deconstruction IS Justice."

Cardoza Law School, 1989:a colloquium is held on the theme of "Deconstruction and The Possibility of Justice," at which Derrida presented what would be considered one of his first "real" political works, "Force of Law: The Mystical Foundations of Authority." In this essay Derrida is replying to the implied accusation leveled against deconstruction, and through it, at him, in the very theme of the colloquium, i.e., that deconstruction is a form of relativism, and consequently dangerous, for it leaves no room for straightforward, universal positions of what is just:

 

[Isn't it because, as certain people suspect, deconstruction doesn't in itself permit any just action, any just discourse on justice but instead constitutes a threat to DROIT, to law or right, and ruins the condition of the very possibility of justice? ... the "sufferance" of deconstruction, what makes it suffer and what makes those it torments suffer, is perhaps the absence of rules, of norms, and definitive criteria that would allow one to distinguish unequivocally between DROIT and justice.

That is the choice, the "either/or," "yes or no" that I detect in this title.]

 

Derrida refuses this simple distinction between relativists and, say, objectivists, or between foundationalism and anti-foundationalism : deconstruction, "this questioning of foundations is neither foundationalist nor anti-foundationalists." Rather, he say, the question – and deconstruction belongs to the history of the question, even as it calls this history itself into question – is one not of mere critique, but intervention and change :

[(Critical legal studies) respond, it seems to me, to the most radical programs of deconstruction that would like, in order to be consistent with itself... to aspire to something more consequential, to CHANGE things and to intervene... Not, doubtless, to change things in the rather naive sense of calculated, deliberate and strategically controlled intervention, but in the sense of maximum intensification of a transformation in progress, in the name of neither a simple symptom nor simple cause (other categories are required here).]

 

This is a repetition of what we have already shown above in our analysis of "SEC," as it was for Derrida. All these points, and the "FoL" generally, are in fact, explicitly framed within a reference to the importance, in the first instance, of language, which, following "SEC," we know is not simply communicating meaning. As he says just after thanking Cardoza for granting him the right to speak, "This question of language and idiom will doubtless be at the heart of what I would like to propose for discussion tonight."

 

He begins, after claiming the role of change and intervention, without which there would be no political, by analyzing the distinction between law and justice. His first point draws attention to the need for a system of signs in order for justice to be possible, in the beginning, and, drawing from his earlier work, equates this system of signs, this language, with more than mere communication: "'At the beginning of justice there was LOGOS, speech or language,' which is not necessarily in contradiction with another incipit, namely, 'In the beginning there will have been force.'" But this is not just any type of force, it is the force explicated in "SEC," the force of the perfomative: "The very emergence of justice and law, the founding and justifying moment that institutes law implies a perfomative force, which is always an interpretive force." Justice, and any system of law, is founded by a force inherent in language, which, as was demonstrated in "SEC," can only be possible as an iterable mark within a preceding system. However, the new system cannot be derived, deduced, or grounded in the old, though it necessitates it, for that would in no way be a new one, but merely a more detailed original system, the working out of a complex tautology. Thus, because the force comes from iterability, which is the possibility of taking the sign out of its original context, the founding perfomative itself will appear "ungrounded":

 

[Since the origin of authority, the foundation or ground, the position of the law can't by definition rest on anything but themselves, they are themselves a violence without ground. Which is not to say that they are in themselves unjust, in the sense of "illegal." They are neither legal nor illegal in their founding moment. They exceed the opposition between founded and unfounded, or between any foundationalism or anti-foundationalism. Even if the success of perfomatives that found law or right... presupposes earlier conditions and conventions... the same "mystical" limit will reappear at the supposed origin of said conditions, rules or conventions, and at the origin of their dominant interpretation.]

 

And, if deconstruction is this process of intervention which allows for signs to be removed from their defining origin, an origin that, as system, necessarily contains this possibility within itself, then deconstruction is both this founding and this intervention, "Deconstruction IS Justice," and Deconstruction IS Political.

 

Justice is therefore not a system of rules, even though it requires one to coexist with it simultaneously. Justice always repeats the system but in such a way as to make each repetition a singularity, which is only possible by treating each repetition anew, as if it were not part of the system but founding it, as if for the first time: "In short, for a decision to be just and responsible, it must, in its proper moment if there is one, be both regulated and without regulation : it must conserve the law and also destroy it or suspend it enough to have to reinvent in each case." This is possible because the law of iterability is inherent in every repetition of a mark. And, thus, there is a direct link between the perfomative, insofar as it is the idealized mode of iterable force, and justice (and the political), which leads Derrida to explicitly declare near the end of the first part of his essay:

 

[If we were to trust in a massive and decisive distinction between perfomative and constative... we would have to attribute this irreducibility of precipitate urgency [of the decision of Justice] ... to the perfomative structure of speech act and acts in general as acts of justice of law, whether they be perfomatives that institute something or derived perfomatives supposing anterior conventions... But as a perfomative cannot be just, in a sense of justice, except by founding itself on conventions and so on other anterior perfomatives, buried or not, it always maintains within itself some irruptive violence, it no longer responds to the demands of theoretical rationality.]

 

 

There is much more of great importance in the "FoL" for a rethinking of justice and the political, and in particular their relation to the perfomative. The goal here, however, has been merely to show how Derrida's work on the political is structured around the "law of iterability," the inherent structure of the perfomative, as put forward in 1971 in the analysis performed in "SEC." The final point that must be reiterated, though, is the call for change, for transformation, that justice requires any sort of "truth"; in fact, "truth" requires the justice of the performative: "the dimension of JUSTESSE or truth of the theoretico-constative utterances... always thus presupposes the dimension of justice of the performative... which never proceeds without a certain dissymmetry and quality of violence." And, justice as perfomative is always "yet, to come... Perhaps it is for this reason that justice... opens up for L'AVENIR(장차) the transformation, the recasting or refounding of law and politics." Or, even more: "Nothing seems to me less outdated than the classical emancipatory ideal." It is with the "irruptive violence" of the perfomative, a violence that is not opposed to but rather identical to an interpretive violence, its independence from truth value and thus from the "demands of theoretical rationality," its madness, that will always link it to change, to the creation of the "new."

 

This explicit reference and structural dependence on the work done in "SEC" is not limited to "the FOL" ; it structures all of Derrida's 'political' works. Just some brief examples: in "SPECTRES of Marx" the very conceptions of EVENT, SPECTRE(or GHOST) and HAUNTOLOGY[the paradoxical state of the spectre, which is neither being nor nonbeing. ] rely on this structure and shape the entire work:

....

 

Derrida's writings following "SEC", however, are not only "political," or mere so, in their problems and questions, not only in their "mention" of the law of iterabiility. They are political in themselves: these works perform, they "use," the performative force of iterabiility, by rethinking and recasting the heritage of western thought, whether it be Aristotle, nietzsche, or Levinas, in new contexts in order to transform them as well as, one can only hope, the world to which they belong. As Michael Naas puts it: "In other words... a text by Derrida is always an event. Always contextual, occasional, always written in response to certain conditions – historical, political, philosophical, personal – Derrida's texts try to invent new means of reflection and reception from out of these conditions." There are, of course, many problems and questions that remain in the wake of Derrida's work: For example, politically speaking, the question of the exact nature of the agent or the subject (if they are the same) in his work. What remains certain, though, is the need, the imperative, to now think through the nature and consequences of this work, an act so far from both unfortunate tendencies of sacred reverence and unthinking dismissal. In any case, we must, of course, begin, again, by re-reading him.