DERRIDA DECONSTRUCTS BUSH

German Law Journal, 2003

An international lawyer is in part pleased, in part embarrassed when philosophers contemplating the international order put their hope in international law. True, such declarations of faith are not normally for the law as it is but as a reformed ideal. But they do enact a routine move international lawyers have made since the late 19th century: one's faith is never to present law, but always to how it will be in a desired future. 1 Messianism may perhaps be interpreted as a defence to excessive expectations loaded on experts of a technical craft. But it must surely be taken seriously when manifested in dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, two of Europe's most influential public intellectuals. This book is not a discussion between Habermas and Derrida but between each and the editor, Giovanna Borradori, Professor of Philosophy at Vassar College. Each is invited to approach the significance of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001 from his own standpoint. The book does not develop into an encounter: perhaps this would have been too much to hope. But it does show the striking similarity of the political conclusions drawn by two philosophers, often seen as adversaries, from the attacks and their aftermath. The dialogues are framed by the editor in two lengthy exposés of the thought of each philosopher plus a commentary on each dialogue. These glosses usefully link the debate to larger themes though to suggest, as Borradori does, that the dialogues are about "the legacy of the Enlightenment in a globalized world" and that Habermas and Derrida "share an allegiance to the Enlightenment" is to have that word do too much work, a reflection of the editor's own project instead of her interlocutors'. To suggest that their agreement is about "the Enlightenment" depoliticises their positions in a way that is faithful to

Space on earth, as far as humans are concerned, is in the process of being 'globalized', at least in the sense that many of the barriers that existed in the modern – as opposed to the postmodern – world have collapsed or have become more permeable than before, allowing two-way flows of various kinds. Most generally, these include cultural flows, economic flows, political and social flows. Unavoidably, they also create the opportunity for 'terror' to cross borders and slip through barriers. Two important thinkers who recently, in the wake of 9/11, responded philosophically to the (by now) ostensibly ubiquitous threat of terror, Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas, did so in interestingly divergent ways. This article is an attempt to characterize the significant philosophical differences between Derrida and Habermas on the question of 'Philosophy in a time of terror', and to situate their responses, elicited by Giovanna Borradori, in a broader context, partly suggested by themselves and Borradori, and partly by other thinkers such as Hardt and Negri. Given the comparably multifaceted character of Derrida's response, proportionally more attention is given to it than to Habermas's.

2013

This thesis examines how the late work of Jacques Derrida challenges the efficacy of the concept of biopolitics to describe the relationship between life and politics. The central question that occupies this thesis is how life becomes part of the political, how it exits the putative spontaneity of nature and enters the calculation of sovereignty. In order to posit this question, my work is organized according to two horizons. The first horizon centers on the ways in which Derrida configures the relationship between life and politics. The second horizon is that the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center or what is now known as September 11 or 9/11 became an event around which Derrida bends this critique of life in politics. My first chapter looks to Derrida's concept of autoimmunity as a way to articulate the problematic conflation of life and politics by the term "biopolitics." While Derrida does not explicitly state his complication of this term, I argue that "autoimmunity" positions life as an impossibly unstable concept, one that cannot and should not be confined to a single understanding. My second chapter turns to the first volume of Derrida's final seminars The Beast and The Sovereign. This chapter continues many of the themes pursued in the first chapter, but changes the focus from an autoimmune critique of democracy toward a more generalized critique of human life as political and non-human life as apolitical. Ultimately I pursue the idea that Derrida sought to rethink a configuration of the political that apprehends life in excess of politics. Derrida imagines a politics that escapes being pulled into the political and contoured into so many configurations of death and subjugation. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First, I would like to thank my partner Nandini Thiyagarajan without whose support and companionship I would be simply lost. Second, I would like to thank my supervisor David L. Clark whose insight, encouragement and patience proved vital as I worked to complete this project. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to experience his mentorship and pedagogy firsthand. I would also like to thank my committee members, Dr. Dana Hollander and Dr. Susan Searls Giroux for their tremendous contributions to my thesis.

This strikes me as a strange conclusion to an otherwise valuable book. Strange, not only because it ascribes to Mouffe a philosophical position (skepticism) and ethical stance (callousness) that do not seem tenable but also because it assumes that the idea of acknowledgment will somehow release us from the costs that belong to politics, the experience of inclusion and exclusion. The constitution of a border can be read not as a logical point about the necessary constitution of a "them" as the condition of the "we" but as a political question about how certain figurations of the "we" and the "they" get constituted in very specific contexts. What Wittgenstein would help us to see here is that there is no logical necessity to exclusion as the timeless condition of inclusion but only the contingencies of certain political practices by which we include and exclude.

The late thought of Jacques Derrida identifies a number of doubles: law and justice, absolute and conditional hospitality, democracy and democracy-to-come. Justice, for example, is the larger principle to which the law aspires, but justice will always remain in excess of law. Justice both makes law possible by providing it with its meaning, but it also makes law impossible by setting up an aspiration that the law can never meet. On the one hand, the law comes into being only in response to justice, but the only existence justice has is by way of law. Normally, justice is seen as the larger, unconditional phenomenon that the law constricts violently by narrowing and reducing it. This paper argues that violence does not only reside on the side of constriction in Derrida, but that unconditionality is itself always a principle of violence. Indeed constriction and unconditionality work togther insperably even as they challenge and defy one another. By connecting these themes with Bataille's theory of sovereignty, this paper explores the horizons of violence in Derrida's political thinking.

Contemporary Pragmatism, 2009

Philosophy Compass, 2007

Derrida's early reluctance to spell out political implications of deconstruction gave way during the course of the 1980s to a series of analyses of political concepts and issues. This article identifies the principal intellectual strategies of Derrida's political engagements and provides a detailed account of his concept of 'democracy to come'. Finally, it suggests several points of contact between Derrida and recent liberal political philosophy, as well as some areas in which deconstructive analyses require further refinement if fruitful exchange is to occur.

In this paper I discuss the positions of Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas on terrorism, as an example of their methods. I explain both deconstruction and reconstruction, and critically evaluate both approaches to philosophy. The paper is intended as a way towards Besinnung, in a time of frantic and confused conceptualization.

Mabini Review, 2012