Singularity, violence and universality in Derrida’s ethics: Deconstruction’s struggle with decisionism
The starting point of the paper is Derrida’s early discussion of Lévinas, focusing on the suggestion that violence is paradoxically magnified in Lévinas’s attempt to articulate ethics as first philosophy within a metaphysics ostensibly free of violence. The next step is an examination of...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | deu |
| Published: |
Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, Belgrade
2024-01-01
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| Series: | Filozofija i Društvo |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://doiserbia.nb.rs/img/doi/0353-5738/2024/0353-57382404847S.pdf |
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| Summary: | The starting point of the paper is Derrida’s early discussion of Lévinas,
focusing on the suggestion that violence is paradoxically magnified in
Lévinas’s attempt to articulate ethics as first philosophy within a
metaphysics ostensibly free of violence. The next step is an examination of
Derrida’s thoughts on Lévi-Strauss and Rousseau in Of Grammatology.
Derrida’s comments on names and violence in Lévi-Strauss establish that
ethics emerges through a distinction between the “good” interior and the
“bad” exterior. Derrida’s subsequent remarks on Rousseau bring up his view
of pity as a pre-social morality and the emergence of a social world that
enacts violence upon the fullness of nature and the spontaneity of pity
within a system of organized, competitive egotism. In his engagement with
Celan, Derrida explores a poetics that conveys the sense of a particular,
singular self as essential to ethics-defining itself in its separation yet
inevitably caught up in universality. This theme develops into an
examination of mass slaughter around the Hebrew Bible story of the
“shibboleth”, highlighting the violent consequences of exclusionary
conceptions of identity. In The Gift of Death, Derrida discusses the
relationship between Paganism, Platonism, and Christianity through Patočka’s
perspective, then returns to Judaism via Kierkegaard’s discussion of Abraham
and Isaac. Derrida’s reflections on secrecy, the sacred, ethical paradox,
the violence of ethical absolutism, and the aporetic nature of ethical
decisions converge around a discussion of political decisionism in Schmitt
and the broader ethical significance of decisionism, as it also appears in
Benjamin. |
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| ISSN: | 0353-5738 2334-8577 |