4th Question: I have a very simple question, actually, and it follows somewhat
the remarks you've just made on the nature of community, of the impossibility
of ethical right, the impossibility of justice as being one of the conditions
of justice. In some of your more recent work the topic of justice has certainly
grown more explicitly, more clearly, even though we might argue, one might
argue that it's been there all the time; and I'd like to ask you to elaborate
a bit more on the nature of justice... You speak, for instance in the Marx
book, of a sense of justice that's so strong, so powerful that it shatters
every calculus, every possible economy and can only be described in terms
of the gift. In a number of little texts that you have... Passions,
Sauf le Nom, the Chora text, you say that these texts
together form a sort of essay from you, and then you say that this essay
has been least understood from those other dimensions as political, as truth.
So if you could elaborate a little more on the meaning of this justice that
can only be described as a gift, that can't be linked to any calculus, to
any kind of...no dialectic, no set of exchanges going on, impossibility
of vengeance, of un-punishment, if you could say - and that might be an
impossible question - but if you would say a little bit more about that,
and if you would say something about that in relation to the question of
the name of singularities, the ones you just made a response to in answering
your question.
Derrida: Yes, all right. You see, before I start trying to answer this question
I will again say this, that, as you see, these questions cannot be really
dealt with in such a forum because they are difficult... really, to do justice
to them you have to read texts, to revise a number of conditions, so it's
very imprudent to address this question in such a way and if I were, let's
say, more responsible I would simply say 'No, I won't play this game'. Nevertheless
I think sometimes it's not a bad thing, at least sometimes, if you don't
do that too often, it's not bad that we try to encapsulate 'in a nutshell'
so that, one day, let me try... one day, I was in Cambridge three years
ago. There was this terrible honorary degree crisis in Cambridge and a journalist
said, 'Well, could you tell me, in a nutshell, what is deconstruction?'
So sometimes, of course, I confess, I was able to do that, and sometimes
it may be useful to try 'nutshells'. So what is this problem of justice...'in
a nutshell'? It is true that all of the problem of justice has been all
the time in my mind and in previous texts; its only relation here is that
I address this problem thematically. And it was in a context in which, reading,
at the moment of a conference in a law school on 'Deconstruction and the
Possibility of Justice' I had to address a text by Benjamin on violence
and I find it, I found it useful to make a distinction between law and justice,
what one calls in French le droit, that is, 'right', or Recht in German,
and Gesetz... in English when you say 'law' you say at the same time 'right'
and 'law', le droit et le loi; in French we distinguish between le droit
et le loi, so there is a distinction between the law - that is, the history
of right or legal systems - and justice.
Following Benjamin and at the same time trying to deconstruct Benjamin's
text or to show how Benjamin's text was deconstructing itself I made this
statement 'in a nutshell', that the law could be deconstructed. There is
a history of legal systems, of rights, of laws, of political laws, and this
history is the history of the transformation of laws. That's why you can
improve law - you can replace laws by other ones, there are constitutions,
there are institutions, this is a history and a history as such can be deconstructed.
Each time you replace a legal system by another one or a law by another
one or you improve... it's a kind of deconstruction, a critical deconstruction.
So the law as such can be deconstructed, it has to be deconstructed; that
is the condition of historicity, revolution, morals, ethics and progress.
But justice is not the law. Justice is what gives us the impulse, the drive,
the movement to improve the law - that is, to deconstruct the law. Without
a call for justice we wouldn't find any interest in deconstructing law.
So that's why I said that the condition of possibility for deconstruction
is a call for justice. Justice is not reducible to the law, to a given system
of legal structures. Which means that justice is always unequal to itself,
it's non-coincident with itself.
Then in the book on Marx I went back again to the Greeks, to the word dike,
to the interpretation of this word which is translated by 'justice' and
I protested the interpretation by Heidegger on dikh and injustice and I
tried to show that justice again implied non-gathering dissociation, heterogeneity,
non-identity with itself and, less an adequation, infinite transcendence.
That's why the call for justice is never, never, let's say, fully answered.
That's why no one can say 'I am just'. The one who does you injustice, you
can be sure that he or she is wrong because being just is not a matter of
theoretical determination. I cannot know whether I am just. I can know that
I am right; I can say, well, I act in agreement with norms or with the law;
I stop at a red light, I am right, there is no problem, but this does not
mean that I am just, which is to say that justice is not a matter of knowledge
or theoretical judgement. That's why it's not a matter of calculation. You
can calculate the law, the right; a judge can say, well, this misdeed deserves
according to the code ten years of imprisonment and so on and so forth;
that may be a matter of calculation but the fact that it's rightly calculated
does not mean that it is just. Now a judge if he wants to be just cannot
content himself with applying the law, he has to reinvent the law each time.
That is, if he wants to be responsible, to make a decision, he has to not
simply apply the law as a coded program to a given case but to reinvent
in a singular situation a new judgement relationship. Which means that a
law, that justice cannot be reduced to a calculation of sanctions, punishments
or rewards. That is already right or in concurrence with the law, but it's
not justice.
Justice - if it has to do with the other, the infinite distance of the other
- is always unequal to the other, is always uncalculatable; you cannot calculate
justice. Levinas says something like that - his definition of justice is
a very minimal one which I love, which I think is really rigorous - he says,
'Justice - that is the relation to the other'; that's all. Once you relate
to the other as the other then something incalculable comes in which cannot
be reduced to the law, to the history of the legal structures. And that
is I think what gives deconstruction its movement, that is, constantly to
suspect, to criticize the given determinations of a culture, of institutions,
of the legal systems not in order to destroy them or simply to cancel them
but to be just, give justice, to respect this relation to the other as justice.
Yes... I missed the last point of your... not only that, but also the last
point of your question about politics. Indeed as you had mentioned I tried
to read in a number of texts - mainly in a text by Plato, the Timaeus, in
which the question of the place, the chora which disturbs and undermines
the whole Platonic system - all the couples or positions which build the
Platonic system - this reflection on chora is part of a political discussion
and I tried to reconstitute this political scenario in order to suggest
- and that's all that I can say here without reopening the text, Plato's,
for instance - in order to suggest that if you take into account this strange
structure of the chora, of the place which is the opening for any inscription,
for any happening, for any event, then you have to not only deconstruct
the traditional concept of politics but to think of another way of interpreting
politics that is the place for the place, the place for hospitality, the
place for the gift, and to think politics otherwise.
So that's part of a number of gestures I've tried in the recent years, to
deconstruct the political tradition not in order to depoliticize but in
order to interpret differently the concept of the political, the concept
of democracy and so on and so forth and to try and articulate this concept
of the political, this concept of democracy with what I said about the gift,
about singularity, a gift. The gift, which is... that's the only thing that
I will say about the gift, this is an enormous problem... but the gift is
precisely - that is what it has in common with justice - something which
cannot be reappropriated; a gift is something which never appears as such
and is never equal to gratitude, to commerce, to compensation, to reward.
When a gift is given, first of all it cannot be... no gratitude can be proportionate
to it. A gift is something that you cannot thank for. As soon as I say 'thank
you' for a gift I start cancelling the gift, I start destroying the gift
by proposing an equivalence that is a circle and circumscribing the gift
in a movement of reappropriation. So a gift is something that goes beyond
the circle of reappropriation, beyond the circle of gratitude. A gift shouldn't
even be acknowledged as such. As soon as I know that I give something, because
I can say, well, I'm giving you something, I just cancel the gift and I'm
just starting to congratulate myself or to thank myself for giving something
and then the circle has already started to cancel the gift. So a gift should
not be rewarded, should not be reappropriated, and should not even appear
as such. As soon as the gift appears as such then the movement of gratitude
has started to destroy the gift. So a gift - if there is such a thing, I'm
not sure, but is there assurance that there is a gift, that a gift is given?
- If the gift is given then it should not even appear to the one who gives
it and the one who receives it, not appear as such. That is paradoxical
but that's the condition for a gift to be given. So that is the condition
the gift shares with justice. A justice which could be, could appear as
such, that could be calculable, if you can calculate what is just and what
is not just, let's say, well, what has to be given in order to be just and
so on and so forth, it is not justice, it's just social security, it's just
economics, it's just... So justice and gift should go beyond calculation,
which doesn't mean that we shouldn't calculate, we should calculate it as
rigorously as possible but there is a point or a limit beyond which calculation
must fail and we must know it and must fail. And so what I tried to think
or to suggest is a concept of the political and of democracy which would
be compatible, which could be articulated with these impossible notions
of the gift and justice. If a democracy or a political system which would
be simply calculatable without justice and gift could be, it is often this
horrible gift, this terrible thing.
Question: Can we talk a little bit about theology?
Derrida: We have started...
Question: You have written... I don't know how many of us, how many of our
audience know this, but you have written a book called Circumfessions
which is constantly drawing an analogy to St. Augustine's Confessions. You
were raised in the Rue Augustin, and born there, were you not?
Derrida: No, I wasn't born there... three months after I was born I went
back to the house in which was in Algiers, which was on the Rue Augustin.
Question: And so like St. Augustine you were born in North Africa. Circumfessions
draws a constant analogy... and one of the things that appears in the Confessions
that you single out is that like St. Augustine your mother was worried about
you and she thought that you were... she was worried about whether you still
believed in God, you said, and that she wouldn't, she didn't ask you about
it but she was asking -
Derrida: - Never.
Question: - She was afraid to ask you... so she asked everyone else. And
you go on to say that you quite rightly passed for an atheist but that the
constancy of God in your life was called by other names. Now I've always
been interested in the way in which figures like Heidegger... my earliest
work was on the relationship between Heidegger and the religious tradition...
and one of the things that has fascinated me about your work and which comes
back to me again as I listened to your answer to the previous question about
justice is how much what you say about justice reminds me of the Biblical
tradition of justice about singularity rather than the philosophical one
where justice is defined in terms of universality, the blind... the blindness
of justice. Now, the question that interests me, and you come back to this
again in the Marx book where you make a distinction - you talk about the
messianic, all this thematic of 'a venir' , 'viens', all of that is... you
describe it as the impossible future, it is the messianic in which you distinguish
a kind of quasi-atheistic messianic from a more garden variety messianic...
if a messianic can have a garden variety... or the organic messianic. So
here is the question: What does Judaism and the Biblical tradition, the
prophetic tradition of justice, what does that mean for you, for your work,
and how do, how can religion and deconstruction commune with each other?
Could they do each other any good? Are they on talking terms?
Derrida: First of all, I'm really intimidated here not only by this question
but by this reference to St. Augustine. The way that I refer to St. Augustine
is really not very orthodox, not very... it's rather... let's say... it's
a sin. I have to confess that my relation to St. Augustine is something
strange. If I had to summarize what I did with St. Augustine in this text
you refer to, Circumfession, I would say this: on one hand, I played
with some analogies, that is, the fact that he was coming from Algeria,
that his mother died in Europe, and my mother was dying when I was writing
this, my mother was dying and so on and so forth... so I was constantly
playing figures of mine off this and quoting sentences from the Confessions
in Latin, but trying through my love and admiration for St. Augustine, because,
say, I know I never met St. Augustine, but to ask a question to Augustine...
it's a number of accidents, not only in these confessions but in their context.
So there is, let's say, a love story and a deconstruction between us. But
I won't insist on St. Augustine here, it's too difficult, and the way that
this text is written cannot begin to account for such and such. See... so,
to address more hurriedly the question of religion - again, in a very oversimplifying
way - I would say this: first, I have no stable position as to the texts
you mentioned - the prophets, the Bible and so on. For me it's an open field
and I can at the same time receive the most necessary provocation from these
texts as from Plato and others.
In Specters of Marx I try to reconstitute the link between Marx and
some prophets and Shakespeare, through Shakespeare. This doesn't mean that
I'm simply a, let's say, a religious person or that I simply, unscrupulously
believe. For me, the concept we think of, the 'religion' within what one
calls religions - Judaism, Christianity or other religions - there are again
tensions, heterogeneities, disruptive 'volcanoes', so to speak, in the text
- even, especially in the prophets - which cannot be, let's say, reduced
to an institution, to a corpus, to a system. So I want to keep the right
to read these texts in a way which has to be culturally reinvented. It is
something which can be totally new at every moment. Then I would distinguish
between - with what I told you before about this tension - I would distinguish
between religion and faith. If by religion you mean a set of beliefs or
dogmas or institutions, church and so on and so forth, I would say that
religion as such can be... not only can be deconstructed but should be deconstructed,
sometimes in the name of faith. For me Kierkegaard is here as a minimum
a great example that is some paradoxical way of contesting the religious
discourse in the name of a faith which has no...no... that can't be simply
mastered or domesticated or taught or logically understood... paradoxical,
paradoxical faith.
Now what I call faith in this case, this has something to do with justice
and the gift, it is something which is presupposed by the most radical deconstructive
gesture. You cannot address the other, speak to the other without an act
of faith, without testimony. What are you doing when you testify, when you
attest to something? You address the other and ask belief. Even if you lie,
even if you are in a perjury you are addressing the other and asking the
other to trust you. This 'trust me, I'm speaking to you' is of the order
of faith. It cannot be reduced to a theoretical statement, to a determining
judgement; it is the opening of the address to the other. So this faith
is not religious, strictly speaking. At least, it is not, it cannot be totally
determined by a given religion. You find it - that's why this faith is absolutely
universal. And this attention to the singularity is not opposed to universality
- I wouldn't oppose as you did universality to singularity, I would try
to keep the two together - and the structure of this act of faith I was
just referring to is not as such conditioned by any given religion. That's
why it is universal. Which doesn't mean that in every given religion, determined
religion you do not find a reference to this pure faith which is not either
Christian nor Jewish nor Islamic nor Buddhist nor anything. Now I would
say the same with the messianic. When I insisted in the book on Marx on
messianicity - which I distinguished from messianism - I wanted to show
that the messianic structure is a universal structure, that as soon as you
address the other, as you are open to the future, as you are, have temporal
experience, you are waiting for the future, you are waiting for someone
to come...that the opening of the experience, someone is to come... is now
to come, and justice, peace will have to do with this coming of the other
- with a promise.
Each time I open my mouth I am promising something; when I speak to you
I am telling you I promise to tell you something, to tell you the truth
- even if I lie. Even if I lie, the condition of my lie is that I promise
to tell you the truth. So the promise is not a speech act among others;
every speech act is permanently a promise. So this universal structure of
the promise, of the expectation for the future, for the one, the coming,
the coming, and the fact that this expectation of the coming has to do with
justice - that is what I call messianic structure. And this messianic structure
is not limited to what one calls messianisms, that is, Jewish, Christian,
or Islamic messianisms with a determined figure, a determined form of the
messiah. As soon as you reduce the messianic structure to messianism then
you are reducing the universality and this has big political consequences;
then you are, let's say, accrediting a tradition among others, the notion
of elect people, of a given ritual language...and so on and so forth. So
that's why I think that the difference however subtle it may appear between
the messianic or messianicity and messianism is very important. So...on
the side of messianicity there is faith. There is no society without a faith,
without a trust in the other. Even if I abuse this, if I lie or if I commit
perjuries, even if I am violent because of this faith, there is no...even
on the economic level, no society without this level of faith, this minimum
act of faith. The credit, what one calls credit in capitalism, in 'capital',
in the economy, has to do with faith; one knows this. The economists know
that faith. This faith is not and should not be reduced or defined by religion
as such.
Now... and I will end with this point here... now the problem remains, and
this is really a problem for me, an enigma, whether what one calls 'religions',
let's say for instance the western religion of the book, whether the religions
where specific examples of this structural, general structure of messianicity
there is a general messianicity as a structure of experience...and on this
modest ground there have been revelations of a history which one calls Judaism
and Christianity and so on and so forth, so that's a possibility; and then
you would have, in a Heideggerian gesture or style you would have to go
back from these religions to the ontological or phenomenological condition
of possibility of religions to describe a general structure of messianicity
on the modest ground of which religions have been made possible. That's
one hypothesis. The other hypothesis - and I confess I hesitate or oscillate
constantly between the two possibilities - the other possibility is that
the event of revelations in Biblical or Jewish traditions, Christian traditions,
Islamic traditions, have been absolute events, irreducible events which
have unveiled this messianicity. We wouldn't know what messianicity is without
messianisms, without these events which were of Moses, Abram, Jesus Christ
and so on and so forth. So in that case singular events would have unveiled
or revealed this universal possibility and it's only on that condition that
you can describe this, the messianicity. Between these two I must confess
I oscillate and I think some other schema has to be constructed to at the
same time do justice to the two possibilities. That's why - and perhaps
it's not a good reason, perhaps one day I will give up this - that's why
for the moment, the time being I keep the word 'messianic' because the word
'messianic', even if it's different from messianism, it's a reference to
the word 'messiah'; it doesn't simply belong to a certain culture, a Jewish/Christian
culture. I think that for the moment being I need this word to...I wouldn't
say to teach but to convince and to make people understand what I am trying
to say when I speak of messianicity, but in doing so I still keep the singularity
of a single revelation, that is, the Jewish/Christian revelation with its
reference to the messiah. It's a reinterpretation so to speak of this tradition
of the messiah. Let me tell you just... a story, something I read, I reread
recently and which I quote in the book on friendship which will be published
in a few days. It's Blanchot, Maurice Blanchot tells this story.
When the messiah in a sort of soiled robe was not recognized, was walking
in... ah, quelle chose?... he was poorly, poorly dressed and so on and so
on... and a young man recognized him, recognized that he was the messiah
and came to him and addressed him and asked the question, 'When will you
come?' I think it's a very profound reading which means that something,
some inadequation between 'the now' and now that he is coming now... the
messianic doesn't wait for... It's a way of waiting for the future, but
right now; and the responsibilities which are assigned to us by this messianic
structure are responsibilities for here and now. So the messiah is not some
future present, it's imminent. It's this imminence that I am describing
when I talk in the name of this messianic structure. Now there is another
possibility I imagine also in this book... that the messiah is not simply
the one, the other that I am waiting for constantly - there would be no
experience without the waiting of the coming of the other, the coming of
the event and justice - the messiah might also be the one I expect while
I don't want it, him, to come. There is this possibility that my relation
to the messiah is that I won't like it to come. I hope that he will come,
that the other will come as other; that will be justice, peace, and revolution
because in the concept of of messianicity there is revolution - not revelation,
but revolution - but at the same time I'm scared. I don't want what I want
and I would like the coming of the messiah to be infinitely postponed. And
the reason, this desire... that's why the man who addresses the messiah
said 'When will you come?' It's a way to say that, well, as long as I speak
to you, as I ask you the question 'When will you come?' at least you're
not coming, and that's the condition for me to go on asking questions and
living and so on and so forth. So that is this ambiguity in the messianic
structure. We wait for something we wouldn't like to wait for. That is another
name for that.
[The panel conversation is closed and questions are invited from the
floor.]
Read on...