Derrida, Paideia, and the Politics of Pedagogy #2

This post continues the longer discussion of Derrida, paideia, and the politics of pedagogy, in the context of the university in the 21st century, particularly since 2007/2008, as perceived through the lens of the UK. It picks up, even if at somewhat of a tangent, from where we left off in the last post where it was noted that while Derrida did not succumb or subscribe fully to the communist or Christian ideological systems prevalent at the Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS), both systems left indelible marks on his future philosophy, as he struggled with the entanglement of philosophy with religion, on the one hand, and of philosophy with politics, on the other hand, as well as the complex nexus constituted by philosophy-religion-politics for Western philosophy. 

It was noted that he engaged with the onto-theology of Christianity, with its interpretation of logos as both ‘word’ and world’, its aetiological hierarchy of ’world’ following upon ‘word’ and its ontology of ousia or substance. It is this engagement which motivates his concern for the hierarchisation of ‘word’, metaphorised as ‘speech’, over ‘world’, metaphorised as ‘writing’, and the dualism of breath-word-speech, in short ‘God’, and substance-world-writing, or God’s creation.

The emphasis on ‘writing’ (in general) and the 'written word' (more narrowly), while contextualised by the onto-theological frame, brings into play a secondary nexus alongside that of philosophy-religion-politics: that of philosophy-literature. This second nexus re-articulates and re-locates earlier debates about the relationship between philosophy and myth, on the one hand, and philosophy and rhetoric, on the other hand, resonant during the time when Plato sought to define the specificity and authority of philosophy as a distinct form of knowledge. What is of interest to Derrida, as John Phillips (No date) points out, is the apparent ideality of literature, an ideality that only the written word makes possible.

Below, we are following the transcript of a discussion of Politics and Friendship with Jacques Derrida at the Centre for Modern French Thought at the University of Sussex on 1 December 1997, moderated by Geoffrey Bennington.

From the beginning, when he started writing and teaching, many people, friendly and unfriendly, reproached Derrida with not directly addressing political questions. This was at the same time both an unfair and fair objection. Unfair because everything he did was directly or indirectly connected with political questions. However, it is true and it is a fair objection to the extent that this relation to politics was very indirect and very elliptical. He wanted to reach a significant level of development in his work before engaging in a re-elaboration of question of ‘the political.

Even so, when addressing ‘the political’, what he writes does not fit within a traditional understanding of ‘politics’. 

Thus, what he tries to do in the books Spectres of Marx and Politics of Friendship is to understand or to re-think, with others, what the political is, what is involved precisely in the dissemination of the political field. In pursuing this goal, he is not proposing a new political content within the old frame but trying to re-define, or to think differently, what is involved in the political as such. Similarly, he does not propose a political theory because what he is saying, specifically in the cases of friendship and hospitality, exceeds (precisely) knowledge: there is some type of experience, of political experience in friendship and hospitality, which cannot be simply the object of a theory, a theorem.

So what Derrida is doing in these books and related texts does not constitute a political theory. Nor is it a deconstructive politics either. Indeed, there is no such a thing as a deconstructive politics, if by the name 'politics' we mean a programme, an agenda, or even the name of a regime. Even the word democracy, when used by Derrida, is not simply the name of a political regime or nation-state organisation. 

Nevertheless, given these caveats, Derrida considers that the time has come to say something more about politics, but not simply to formulate a political theory or a deconstructive politics. To say something about politics is not simply a speculative gesture. It is a concrete and personal commitment, and this performative commitment is part of what he is writing. Therefore, Spectres of Marx, before being a text about Marx's theory and Marx's heritage, is a personal commitment at a certain moment, in a certain form, in a singular fashion.

Given this this orientation and this commitment to politics and to the political, why does Derrida grant privilege within this field to friendship? Friendship is marginal in the usual taxonomies of political concepts. It is usually left to ethics, psychology or morals; and is not considered a political concept in the way that government, sovereignty or citizenship are. However, as you read the canonical texts in political theory, starting with Plato or Aristotle, you discover that friendship plays an organising role in the definition of justice and even of democracy. 

For example, several texts of Plato and Aristotle define friendship as the essential virtue. For Aristotle, there are three types of friendship: the higher friendship, a friendship between two virtuous men, based on virtue which has nothing to do with politics; the friendship grounded on utility and usefulness, which is political friendship; and, on the lower level, friendship grounded on pleasure. Thus, we have a concept of friendship which is and is not political, which is not simply political. In Aristotle, the quest for justice has nothing to do with politics; you have to go beyond or sometimes betray friendship in the name of justice. So, there are a number of problems in which you see philia or friendship playing an organising role in the definition of the political experience.

What Derrida then does is to follow the thread of the paradoxes between friendship and politics, to look for a canonical model of friendship which in our culture from the Greeks to now, in Greek culture, in Roman culture, in Jewish, Christian and Islamic culture, has been dominant, has been prevailing and hegemonic. His question is: What are the features of this prevailing hegemonic concept which could be politically meaningful and politically significant? This is not a single homogeneous concept. While this concept is not exactly the same in Greece, in the Middle Ages, and today, nevertheless there are some permanent features. It is this set of permanent features that Derrida seeks to discover, analyse and formalise from a political point of view.

What are these permanent features?The first, canonical, model is that of a friendship between two young men, two mortals aware of their mortality, who have a contract according to which one will survive the other, one will be the heir of the other, and they will agree politically. Women are excluded from this model of friendship, a woman as the friend of a man or women as friends between themselves.

The figure of the brother and the relation of fraternity/brotherhood, is at the centre of this canonical model. This concept of fraternity/brotherhood has a number of cultural and historical instances. It comes from Ancient Greece, but it also comes from the Christian model in which men are all brothers because they are sons of God. The ethics of this concept can even be found in an apparently secular concept of friendship and politics. In the French Revolution, brotherhood is the foundation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Fraternity appears, between equality and liberty, as one of the foundations of the republic.

This does not mean that a woman could not have the experience of friendship with a man or with another woman. It means, rather, that within this culture, this society, by which this prevalent canon was considered legitimate, accredited, there was no voice, no discourse, no possibility of acknowledging these excluded possibilities.

Derrida argues that the concepts which are fundamental in traditional thinking about politics, such as sovereignty, power and representation, are directly or indirectly marked by this canonical concept of fraternity/brotherhood. Even the idea of democracy, the way it was defined in the beginning, had to agree with the presuppositions of this concept, with the privilege granted to man and to fraternity/brotherhood.

Derrida’s next question, then, is: What does fraternity/brotherhood mean? It means, of course, the family, the familial schema, filiation. 

Here are, Derrida suggests, all the conditions for the canonical definition of politics, the state, the relation to autochthony in Greece, to the territory, the nation-state, filiation, representation, sovereignty. All these share this phallocentric concept of the social bond as friendship.

This is why Derrida thought that the problematic of friendship could be useful in order to go on with the deconstruction of traditional political theory, and to provide him with a strategic lever to continue the work he has done, while entering the field of politics in a more efficient way.

Democracy is a strange name for a regime, Derrida acknowledges. From the beginning, it was difficult to locate democracy among the spectrum of regimes, and there have always been difficulties with assigning a place to democracy. At a minimum, democracy means equality. This is why friendship is an important key, because in friendship, even in classical friendship, what is involved is reciprocity, equality, symmetry. There is no democracy except as equality among everyone. However, this is an equality which can be calculated, countable: you count the number of units, of voters, of voices, of citizens. At the same time, this demand for equality has to be reconciled with the demand for singularity, with respect for the Other as singular. These two distinct demands constitute an aporia: How can we take into account the equality of everyone, justice and equity, and nevertheless take into account and respect the heterogeneous singularity of everyone?

From the beginning, democracy has been associated with values, with axioms, which belong to this canonical concept of friendship, that is, brotherhood, family, roots in a territory (autochthony), the nation-state depending on a territory, soil and place, and so on. Derrida argues that it is possible to think of a democracy which could be articulated with another concept of friendship, another experience of friendship which would not simply be dependent on or subordinate to what I call the prevalent canonical phallogocentric, male concept of friendship. This is what he is trying to elaborate in the Politics of Friendship. This other democracy is no longer simply reducible to citizenship, to the organisation of a regime for a given society as nation-state.

Can we think of a democracy beyond the limits of the classical political model, of the nation-state and its borders? Is it possible to think differently this double injunction of equality for everyone and respect for singularity beyond the limits of classical politics and classical friendship?

It is in the name of democracy that Derrida is interested in questioning, or deconstructing, the canonical concept of friendship. This is because Derrida thinks that there is inequality and repression in the traditional concept of friendship such as we inherit it. It is in the name of more democracy that we have to unlock, to open, to displace this prevalent concept and this is not Derrida’s initiative. It is a process already underway in the world at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. 

When Derrida speaks of a 'democracy to come', he does not mean a future democracy, a new regime, a new organisation of nation-states, even if this is something that might be hoped for. He means this 'to come' as the promise of an authentic democracy which is never embodied in what we call democracy. It means, first of all, that this democracy we dream of is linked in its concept to a promise. The idea of a promise is inscribed in the idea of a democracy: equality, freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, all these things are inscribed as promises within democracy. 

Democracy is a promise. This is a thoroughly historical concept of the political. The endless process of improvement and perfectibility is inscribed in the concept. We do not have to wait for future democracy to happen, to appear, we have to do right here and now what has to be done for it. That is an injunction, an immediate injunction, no delay. This does not mean that it will take the form of a regime. However, if we dissociate democracy from the name of a regime, we can then give this name 'democracy' to any kind of experience in which there is equality, justice, equity, respect for the singularity of the Other at work, then it is democracy here and now. This implies that we do not confine democracy to the political in the classical sense, to the nation-state or to citizenship. [Are there similarities here to Hannah Arendt’s ‘space of appearance’, where political actors appear to one another in a performative openness to one another?]

We have today to think of a democratic relationship not only with other citizens but also with non-citizens. This non-citizenship of people we have to care for, to welcome, urges us, compels us, to think of a democratic relationship beyond the borders of the nation-state. This is a modern experience. Hannah Arendt brought to attention the situation that, after the First World War, there were in Europe vast numbers of people not even in exile, not even deported but displaced persons who were not considered citizens. This, according to Hannah Arendt, is one of the factors in what happened in the Second World War.  

This requires the invention of new practices, new international law, the transformation of the sovereignty of the state. There are, therefore, a number of urgent problems which require precisely this transformation of the concept of the political, the concept of democracy, and the concept of friendship. This accounts, to some extent, for the reasons Derrida privileged the theme of hospitality in his subsequent seminars and publications.

Derrida argues that the Other, whoever he or she is, must be welcomed unconditionally, without asking for a document, a name, a context or a passport. This is an unconditional injunction. It is the very first opening of my relation to the Other. I have to open my space, my home, my house, my language, my culture, my nation, my state, and myself. It is open before I make a decision about it. Then I have to keep it open, or try to keep it open, unconditionally.

This is frightening, scary. This unconditional entering my space may well displace everything in my space, to upset, to undermine, to even destroy. The worst may happen. I am open to this, the best and the worst.

Since this unconditional hospitality may lead to a perversion of this ethics of friendship, we, of course, have to condition this unconditionality, to negotiate the relation between this unconditional injunction and the necessary condition, to organise this hospitality, which means laws, rights, conventions, borders, laws on immigration and so on.

Thinking of a new politics of hospitality, a new relationship to citizenship, requires a re-thinking of all these previously discussed problems relating to democracy, friendship and politics; to the family, the territory and the nation-state; to the international order and international law.

We could simply dream of a democracy which would take a cosmopolitan form. There is a tradition of cosmopolitanism which comes to us from Greek thought with the Stoics, who have a concept of the 'citizen of the world’; and from St. Paul in the Christian tradition, who also has a certain call for a citizen of the world as, precisely, a brother. We could follow this tradition up until Kant for instance, in whose concept of cosmopolitanism we find the conditions for hospitality. However, in the concept of the cosmopolitical in Kant there are a number of conditions. For example, you should welcome the stranger, the foreigner, to the extent that he is a citizen of another country, that you grant him the right to visit and not to stay.

This concept of the cosmopolitical  is limited precisely by the reference to the political, to the state, to the authority of the state, to citizenship, and to strict control of residency and period of stay. So, Derrida thinks that what he calls a 'New International' in Spectres of Marx should go beyond this concept of the cosmopolitical strictly speaking.

While there is a lot to be done within the State and in international organisations that respect the sovereignty of the State, I.e. what we call politics today, beyond this task, which is enormous, we must think and be oriented by something which is more than cosmopolitical, more than citizenship. This itinerary calls for a new concept of democracy grounded on this groundless experience of friendship, which should not be limited in the way it has been, and a concept of democracy which would re-define the political not only beyond the nation-state but beyond the cosmopolitical itself.

In everyday life, we see that the classical concept of democracy, the way it inhabits all the rhetoric of politicians and parliament, is shaken, that we need something else. We see that the concept of citizenship, the concept of the border, immigration, are today under a terrible seismic displacement. 

So what seems to be, and indeed is, very far ahead of us, is also very close to us every day, and it is an urgent task to re-elaborate, to re-think, to re-engage and to be committed differently with these issues.

Derrida, J. and Bennington, G. (1997). Politics and friendship: a discussion with Jacques Derrida. Centre for Modern French Thought, University of Sussex. Available from http://livingphilosophy.org/derrida-politics-friendship.htm [Accessed 21 October 2018].

Phillips, J. (No date). Derrida and deconstruction. Course webpages of John Phillips. Available from https://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp/derriduction.htm [Accessed 6 March 2019]