Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
by
NOAH HORWITZ
Loyola University Chicago
ABSTRACT
Jacques Derrida’s insistence on submitting politics to the test of undecidability elicits
the common accusation that an aporetic form of thought can only end in dubious
conclusions concerning the pressing matter of politics and that no normative claims
can emerge from a thought of radical undecidability. In this paper, I articulate the
structural undecidability (aporia) that constitutes politics according to Derrida, the man-
ner in which this structural undecidability elicits judgments, and the importance for
critique of not ignoring it. In particular, this structural undecidability is articulated
within the event of foundation of any state or set of social relations by way of a declar-
ative act. In addition, the aporetic structure of the political renders visible the essen-
tial relationship between (revealed) religion and politics. Ultimately, due to a necessary
reference to an ultimate authority at any event of foundation, the political is always
already theologico-political in character.
Research in Phenomenology, 32
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands 2002
derrida and the aporia of the political 157
This act then has the modality of being both impossible (for how can
something call itself into being?) and necessary (for without such an
act the state or institution would not be founded). The oscillation
between viewing this act as a description of what already exists and
the bringing into being of an entity cannot be overcome and forms
the general structure of all such declarative acts.
Such an act produces the paradox of an entity calling itself into
being, of the signature preceding the one who signs (here, by way of
their representatives, the people of the U.S.):
But this people does not exist. They do not exist as an entity, it does not
exist, before this declaration, not as such. If it gives birth to itself, as free
and independent subject, as possible signer, this can hold only in the act
of the signature. The signature invents the signer. This signer can only
authorize him- or herself to sign once he or she has come to the end
[parvenu au vout], if one can say this, of his or her signature, in a sort of
fabulous retroactivity. (DI, 10)
The declarative act then has the deferred eVect, the “fabulous retroac-
tivity,” of bringing into being what only will have been. In other words,
the event of foundation, in a paradoxical fashion by way of Nachträglichkeit,
brings into being a ction.5 The people have the status of a ction,
and so are “fabulous,” precisely due to the paradox of the event of
derrida and the aporia of the political 161
it to come into being. And because the declarative act must describe
what it founds by referring to something outside of itself and seem-
ingly prior to itself, the event of foundation must always have recourse
to something heterogeneous to what it founds. The state has its foun-
dation in something other than itself, in the people, so that the
foundation of the state is outside of itself. But, as we have seen, this
people itself cannot be except by way of the declarative act that initi-
ates the state. The declarative act must vacillate between the perfor-
mative and the constative, and between auto-reference (having its
legitimacy only within the declarative act) and hetero-reference (see-
ing its foundation arise outside of itself in something heterogeneous to
itself ); consequently, it always carries with itself an instability that forms
the very event of foundation and structures the event aporetically.
The invention of the state thus founds a state of right, founds the
norms and rules of the state, only through giving these norms the legit-
imacy of a legal ction or self-legitimating ction and an instability
that undercuts their absoluteness. But Derrida’s demonstration that
such an event upsets the division between the performative and the
constative does not mean that such a distinction no longer holds; it
means, rather, that the structuration of the event of foundation shows
how a crossover between the two categories contaminates this distinc-
tion. The distinction between the performative and the constative must
be upheld (since the two are not simply identical and since some speech
acts are one or the other), but this distinction, once set up, helps to
reveal the inmixing of the two in the very structure of the aporetic event.
The coup of force is dissimulated by the very structure of the declar-
ative act that implicitly describes what it founds. Derrida’s decon-
structive eVort reactivates this event and enables the coup of force
that structures it to become visible again. The legitimate order gains
its legitimacy by retroactively rendering invisible that its legitimation
rests on the aporia of its foundation, but this violence at the founda-
tion occurs precisely due to the fabulous circle of a declarative act that
establishes an institution and simultaneously and retroactively dissim-
ulates this very act as political, as an act of force, as having contained
a dimension of constitutive violence. Since the dissimulation is part
and parcel of the very structure of this act, a deconstructive reactiva-
tion of such events is interminably called for so that the political event
that founds social structures and relations can be rendered visible.
Since the deconstructive act reactivates the event of foundation of
a state or institution and points to the question of origins, it points
derrida and the aporia of the political 163
out the unstable point of every order and institution. The question of
the event of foundation for any order is always traumatic, since any
order nds its legitimacy by dissimulating the coup of force found at
its institution. 6 When one is reminded of the political dimension of insti-
tutions, one sees the non-absoluteness of their foundation and legiti-
macy. By way of Derrida’s analysis of the ‘Declaration of Independence’,
the aporia of the political as the aporia of the event of foundation of
a state or institution shows its irreducible and structural place.7
4. Politicization
Now, the event of foundation is related to attempts to x the context
of politics, of what counts as politics, and what can be articulated as
a politics. While this event of foundation opens and may precede any
particular context, it also relates to attempts to x a context. How-
ever, given that the aporetic event is structurally undecidable, no con-
text can be fully and absolutely determined and xed. In Limited Inc.,
Derrida elaborates on the notion of the nonabsolute closure or satu-
ration of contexts and how it relates to politics, and this elaboration
begins to draw out further the consequences of the aporia of the polit-
ical. For Derrida, there is always “something political” in any attempt
to x a context: “Such experience is always political because it implies,
insofar as it involves determination, a certain type of non-‘natural’ rela-
tionship to others.” 8 The event of foundation allows for the determi-
nation of a context by bringing into existence, in some institution or
order, a social structure or set of relations. These relations do not exist
prior to this event and thereby can be seen as nonnatural.
By xing a context, a certain kind of politics is always tacitly intro-
duced. To determine the context of utterances “cannot be apolitical,”
since the contextual determination presupposes a political dimension
that always insinuates itself (LI, 136). Given that a context cannot be
absolutely xed or saturated, any particular determination of it implies
a relatively contingent decision and a relatively contingent act. The
nongivenness of how these contexts should be determined means that
any act is nonnecessary and involves what Derrida would here call a
political nature. Such acts thus imply relations of force by xing what
cannot be absolutely closed (LI, 152).
The irreducible nonclosure of context that can be found in the
event of foundation due to its paradoxical structure always allows for
an opening onto the politics of xing contexts and deciding upon and
164 noah horwitz
Now, the very least that can be said of unconditionality (a word that I
use not by accident to recall the character of the categorical imperative
in its Kantian form) is that it is independent of every determinate con-
text, even of the determination of a context in general. It announces
itself as such only in the opening of context. Not that it is simply present
(existent) elsewhere, outside of all context; rather, it intervenes in the
determination of a context from its very inception, and from an injunc-
tion, a law, a responsibility that transcends this or that determination of
a given context. Following this, what remains is to articulate this uncon-
ditionality with the determinate (Kant would say, hypothetical) conditions
of this or that context; and this is the moment of strategies, of rhetorics,
of ethics, and of politics. The structure thus described supposes both that
there are only contexts, that nothing exists outside context, as I have often
said, but also that the limit of the frame or the border of the context
always entails a clause of nonclosure. (LI, 152)
For Derrida, “this unconditionality also de nes the injunction that
prescribes deconstructing” (LI, 153). One can and must deconstruct
precisely because of the structural undecidability of the event of insti-
tution and the unconditional nonclosure of contexts. This uncondi-
tionality is thus a kind of transcendent and sublime law that informs,
intervenes, and opens any particular politics. Deconstruction takes its
force and motivation from this unconditionality in the same way as it
does from structural undecidability and aporia. The event of founda-
tion or the xing of contexts is contingent and incomplete because
there is no way of deducing a priori how or what they should deter-
mine; however, there is a general structure of the event, as aporetic
and as transcendent unconditionality, that intervenes at each instance.
The relatively contingent institution of institutions is possible because
this event is not fully achieved, but only will have been. This contin-
gency and incompletion leads to politicization insofar as the aporia of
the political and the unconditionality of nonclosure intervene at each
instance. While, at this point, one does not examine particular deter-
minations, one shows how particular determinations and events are
possible and how they are always informed by a general structure.
of the truth: the establishment of this constitutional law had not only,
both in fact and in practice, taken the form of a singular coup of force,
but this one act at once produced and presupposed the unity of a nation.”9
According to Derrida, Mandela, in contesting the legitimacy of South
Africa as actually representing the entire people of the state, renders
visible the coup of force found at the institution of the state.
The founding of South Africa, of course, attempted to produce and
describe an (already) uni ed nation and people; but here, according
to Derrida, the South African state was never able to establish itself
because its coup of force was “a bad coup” (LF, 18). The coup of
force found in the instituting of South Africa could never fully dis-
simulate itself and be rendered invisible due to the obvious ction that
the people brought into being by the state only represented “a lim-
ited sum of private interests, those of the white minority” (LF, 18). For
Derrida, because only the white minority signed for and onto this
declarative act, the exclusion of the black majority delegitimates this
declarative act. But, according to Derrida, the signature invents the
signer, so that, in some sense, the people of South Africa were brought
into being by this declarative act. However, due to the obvious exclu-
sion, Derrida wishes to argue that the coup of force remains constantly
visible and undercuts what has been brought into being.
But given that such a coup of force is found in all events of foun-
dation, by what right does Derrida call into question the South African
state in particular? If the unity of the nation or people invented by a
declarative act is always something of a legal ction that never com-
pletely overlaps and corresponds to the actual population of a state,
how is it that the coup of force in this instance can be contested
whereas elsewhere it remains forgotten? Derrida attempts to explain
further why this particular coup of force can be called “bad” due to
the obvious discrepancy between what has been declared and what
remains in fact:
In the case of South Africa, certain ‘conventions’ were not respected, the
violence was too great, visibly too great, at a moment when this visibility
extended to a new international scene, and so on. The white commu-
nity was too much in the minority, the disproportion of wealth too agrant.
From then on this violence remains at once excessive and powerless,
insuYcient in its results, lost in its own contradiction (LF, 18).
The declarative act, like any act that includes a performative dimen-
sion, depends on certain conventions and that these conventions be
derrida and the aporia of the political 167
Mandela knows that: no matter how democratic it is, and even if it seems
to conform to the principle of the equality of all before the law, the
absolute inauguration of a state cannot presuppose the previously legit-
imized existence of a national entity. The same is true for a rst consti-
tution. The total unity of a nation is not identi ed for the rst time
except by a contract—formal or not, written or not—which institutes
some fundamental law. Now this contract is never actually signed, except
by supposed representatives of the nation which is supposed to be ‘entire.’
This fundamental law cannot, either in law or in fact, simply precede
that which at once institutes it and nevertheless supposes it; projecting
and re ecting it! It can in no way precede this extraordinary performa-
tive by which a signature authorizes itself to sign, in a word, legalizes
itself on its own without the guarantee of preexisting law. This violence
and this autographic ction are found at work just as surely in what we
call individual autobiography as in the ‘historical’ origin of states. In the
case of South Africa, the ction lies in this—and it is a ction against
a ction: the unity of the ‘entire nation’ could not correspond to the
delimitation eVected by the white minority. (LF, 20–21)
In founding a new South Africa one does not want to recognize the
violence that instituted the former one, but at the same time this new
event of foundation will itself be structured by a coup of force:
It should now constitute a whole (the white minority plus all the inhab-
itants of South Africa) whose con guration was only to be established,
in any case to be identi ed, by beginning with a minority violence. That
it can from then on oppose this violence alters nothing about this terri-
fying contradiction. The ‘entire nation,’ a unity of ‘all the national groups,’
will grant itself existence and legal force only by the very same act to
which the Charter of Freedom appeals. This Charter speaks in the pre-
sent, a present supposed to be founded on the description of historical fact,
which, in turn, should be recognized in the future. It also speaks in the
future, a future which has a prescriptive value. (LF, 21)
Here the diVerence would be that the unity of the nation would be
closer and more approximate to this legal ction because its signing
would not exclude the majority of the population. But this legal ction
would itself arise through a coup of force and never fully correspond
to the actual state of aVairs.
derrida and the aporia of the political 169
The critique of South Africa thus involves not dismissing the legal
ction of the entire nation, but upholding this ction and demon-
strating the contradiction between it and the actual state of aVairs.
That any new event of foundation will itself be informed by a coup
of force does not undermine this critique, since it is precisely the
attempt to better approximate and take seriously this legal ction that
makes it more likely that the new event of foundation will become
invisible and recede into the past. To take this legal ction seriously
oVers up a critique of the current state of aVairs. In addition, the con-
stitutive discrepancy of the legal ction to the current state of aVairs,
and the constitutive coup of force at the event of foundation remain
the ever-possible resource for calling into question any state that does
not adhere to the principles and legal ctions that form and legitimize
it. The fact that a new declarative act will itself contain a coup of
force may initially appear to be a disabling contradiction, but actually
it is only due to the aporia of the event of foundation that such a cri-
tique is possible.
When one founds a state that claims to be ‘a state of and for all’,
this self-legitimating legal edict takes on a “prescriptive value” such that
it must be upheld. When it is not upheld and taken seriously, the state
itself is called into question. The declarative act thus comes with an
unconditional call for the legal ction to exist in fact even if this exis-
tence is impossible. This necessary but impossible unconditional demand
is opened precisely by the aporia of the political, that is, by the struc-
turally undecidable declarative act. It oVers the resource for critique
and questioning. The coup of force at the event of foundation can
always be recalled and rendered visible. And if the prescriptive value
of its founding act is not respected, then this coup of force will remain
visible and never fully dissimulated.
But the decision to hear and answer to this unconditional opening
and to recall the coup of force at the event of foundation remains a
matter of judgment.10 It is a judgment of degree. It is the judgment,
for instance, that a minority is too much a minority. While there is no
a priori rule for deciding where something is excessive or where a
minority is too much of a minority, this lack of a rule means that it
is a political decision to recall the coup of force. Even if one points
out the constitutive nature of a coup of force and the irreducible dis-
junct between a legal ction and a state of aVairs, these irreducible
aspects of the foundation of a state give legal ctions a prescriptive
value that can be heard and the critic a resource for denouncing a
170 noah horwitz
Still, one must examine these events because they do open various
elds of possibilities and forms of possible manifestation. The general
structure makes the event possible and thinkable, but conversely, a
particular event, in its status as an example, allows one to articulate
the general structure.
The undecidability here is constitutive of the structure of the event
and the general possibilities it gives rise to. No choice between the
two, event and general structure, can be made since one always implies
the other. One can call this particular undecidability theological inso-
far as it is paradigmatically governed by the example of revealed reli-
gion. In addition, it shows how any event, political or otherwise, relates
to truth and revelation. To relate the event to this undecidability makes
the thinking of the political as event of foundation always already a
theologico-political discourse.
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one peo-
ple to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with
another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and
equal station to which the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle
derrida and the aporia of the political 173
‘Are and ought to be’; and the ‘and’ articulates and conjoins here the
two discursive modalities, the to be and the ought to be, the constation
and the prescription, the fact and the right. And is God: at once creator
of nature and judge, supreme judge of what is (the state of the world)
and of what relates to what ought to be (the rectitude of our intentions).
The instance of judgment, at the level of the supreme judge, is the last
instance for saying the fact and the law. (DI, 11–12)
174 noah horwitz
NOTES
1. Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reections on Today’s Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne
Brault and Michael B. Nass (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992), 41.
2. I am drawing liberally on the work of Ernesto Laclau in order to articulate the rel-
evance of Derridean deconstruction to politics. In particular, I am drawing upon
his essay “Deconstruction, Pragmatism, Hegemony,” in Deconstruction and Pragmatism,
ed. Chantal MouVe (New York: Routledge, 1996), 47–68.
3. Jacques Derrida, Aporias: Dying —awaiting (one another at) the ‘limits of truth’, trans.
Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993), 12; henceforth cited as A, followed
by page.
4. Jacques Derrida, “Declarations of Independence,” trans. Tom Keenan and Tom
Pepper, New Political Science 15 (Summer 1986): 7–15, 8; henceforth cited as DI, fol-
lowed by page.
5. For further analysis of such legal ctions, see Jeremy Bentham’s Theory of Fictions
(London: K. Paul, Trench, Tribner, 1932). Jacques Lacan has appropriated Bentham’s
theory within the context of his own theory in, for example, his The Seminar of Jacques
Lacan Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, trans. Dennis Porter, ed. Jacques-
Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 1992).
6. Did we not just experience such a trauma in the American presidential election of
2000? One could say that elections in a representative democracy reproduce the
founding moment of the state. Based on the principle of popular sovereignty, such
elections express and describe the people’s will by bringing it into being at the same
time. A certain administration is performatively enacted and brought into being
while at the same time being a description of a certain state of aVairs, the people’s
will. When such a process goes awry, the aporetic nature of the event is rendered
visible. This visibility means the abyssal nature of the act comes to the fore. At this
moment, the very essence (usually disavowed) of democracy becomes apparent.
Following Claude Lefort, one can say that democracy is constituted by such a void
of power and by the paradoxes involved in ‘the people’ constituting itself. When an
election goes awry, the empty place of power becomes apparent. For Lefort’s analy-
sis of the structure of democracy, see his Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David
Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1988).
7. Of course, one could also show how a homologous aporetic structure is involved in
law through an analysis of its foundation and origins. For example, Derrida artic-
ulates the aporia of law in his analysis of Kafka, Freud, and Kant in the essay
“Before the Law” (cf. Jacques Derrida, “Before the Law,” in Acts of Literature, ed.
Derek Attridge [New York: Routledge, 1992], 181–220). In addition, Derrida oVers
an analysis of the aporia of law that relates and overlaps with many of the issues
developed in the body of my paper in his “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundations
of Authority’,” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel
Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3–67. In Derrida
and the Political, Richard Beardsworth takes up the aporia of law in order to situate
Derrida as a political thinker. While Beardsworth concentrates primarily on the tem-
poral dimension of the aporia and on Derrida’s relation to Kant, Hegel, and
Heidegger, Beardsworth also elaborates the aporia of law in order to demonstrate
the constitutive violence of institution. Cf. Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political
(New York: Routledge, 1996).
176 noah horwitz
8. Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 136.
To be referred to henceforth in parenthesis as LI. For a further analysis of Derrida’s
political thought insofar as it concerns the nonclosure of context and the politi-
cization that follows, see Simon Critchley’s The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and
Levinas (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992).
9. Jacques Derrida, “The Laws of Re ection: Nelson Mandela, in Admiration,” in
For Nelson Mandela, ed. Jacques Derrida and Mustapha Tlili (New York: Seaver,
1987), 17, referred cited as LF, followed by page.
10. Here a matter of judgment in the sense of frñnhsiw rather than yevrÛa.
11. Here I am arguing that Derrida’s intervention into politics by way of the notion
of aporia does allow for discriminating particular instances by way of judgment,
which is to say, by way of a politics of judging. The charge that Derridean decon-
struction disallows such discrimination is a charge usually thought to dismiss the
relevance of deconstruction to politics. Thomas McCarthy has oVered a critique
of deconstruction on precisely these terms (and, although he does raise other ques-
tions about deconstruction, this particular critique remains the most forceful and
relevant). See his “The Politics of the IneVable: Derrida’s Deconstructionism,” The
Philosophical Forum 21 (fall-winter 1989–90): 146–68. Implicitly and explicitly, my
account of Derrida takes issue with McCarthy’s most forceful critique of Derrida
found on pages 154–56. For a defense of the relevance of deconstruction to pol-
itics in relation to other charges leveled against it (for example, that deconstruc-
tion leads to a form of textual idealism unsuitable for the reality of politics), see
Bill Reading’s “The Deconstruction of Politics” in Reading de Man Reading, ed.
Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1989), 223–43.
12. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (New York: Verso, 1997),
18–19; henceforth cited PF, followed by page.
13. This recourse is violence, is the very ‘essence’ of violence. And of course I am
here examining the theological eVect that is at work in the political and not argu-
ing that the work of deconstruction is itself theological. Deconstruction is not itself
a founding discourse. However, deconstruction does demonstrate the constitutive
nature of the theological eVect. The theological is not merely a transcendental illu-
sion, but rather part and parcel of the aporetic structure of the event. It is thereby
a ‘lure’ (and not simply one to be overcome). Derrida refers to the lure of the
theological as the “theological trap” and further articulates its structure in his
Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981),
258. For further analysis of the constitutive “trap” of the theological, see Rodolphe
Gasche’s “God, for Example,” in his Inventions of DiVerence: On Jacques Derrida
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). Derrida himself has oVered his own
criticisms of characterizing deconstruction as ‘negative theology’ in, for example,
his “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” trans. Ken Frieden, in Derrida and Negative
Theology, ed. Howard Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1992).
14. Implicitly, here Derrida would both be accounting for the constitutive ‘lure’ of a
‘determination in the last instance’ and undermining the very possibility of any such
instance. Derrida would thereby undercut Louis Althusser’s appeal to such an instance,
but Derrida would also show how such an appeal to a ‘determination in the last
instance’ forms the theologico-political moment of Althusser’s Marxist discourse. In
other words, Derrida renders visible how a discourse performs a theological gesture
that obscures the aporetic.