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""Derrida and the Time of the Political" undoes once and for all the unproductive opposition between deconstruction and politics that has dominated the United States academy. This is a stellar collection. The pieces are diversified, not a commemorative gesture but a critical engagement. Careful theoretical parsing combines with detailed political awareness to make this book an authoritative document for understanding not only the later Derrida and political deconstruction but the problems and engagements of our time."--Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, University Professor and Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University

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Derrida and the time of the political

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments.........................................................................................................1PART I. Openings........................................................................................................41PART II. The -venir: Undoing Sovereignty and Teleology.................................................................57TIENNE BALIBAR Eschatology versus Teleology: The Suspended Dialogue between Derrida and Althusser.....................74PHENG CHEAH The Untimely Secret of Democracy...........................................................................97GEOFFREY BENNINGTON Sovereign Stupidity and Autoimmunity...............................................................114PART III. Responsibilities within and without Europe....................................................................135RODOLPHE GASCH European Memories: Jan Patocka and Jacques Derrida on Responsibility...................................158ANNE NORTON "Call me Ishmael"..........................................................................................177SORAYA TLATLI Algeria as an Archive....................................................................................196PART IV. Between Ethics and Politics....................................................................................215MARCEL HNAFF The Aporia of Pure Giving and the Aim of Reciprocity: On Derrida's Given Time............................235MARTIN JAY Pseudology: Derrida on Arendt and Lying in Politics.........................................................255SUZANNE GUERLAC The Fragility of the Pardon (Derrida and Ricoeur)......................................................274PART V. Afterword.......................................................................................................291JUDITH BUTLER Finishing, Starting......................................................................................307Bibliography............................................................................................................323Contributors............................................................................................................327

Chapter One

HLNE CIXOUS Translated by Peggy Kamuf

(Exergue)

His thoughtful, insistent worry in the face of every scene of political convocation, several times a year-and each time unique naturally-could be translated more or less exactly in these terms: "If I knew what I must do, then I would know how to do it. But how to speak of the GATT? So complicated. How to find the schema, as Kant would say, between philosophical thought and the scene of ordinary decision? Very difficult."

In other words, "How not to respond?" to a situation that is apparently novel? What good way of disappointing expectations can I invent? [Quel bon faux bond inventer?]

The Time of the Political

1. Before I begin, allow me to confide that I am not sure I understand this title, or know where it is leading us.

Am I supposed to understand that the Time of the Political is "now"?

Or to come? Or else is it the call to a phenomenology of Time qualified as political? Is it an allusion to Politics of Friendship and to the undecidable leitmotiv of the Time is out of joint? Is not Time more or less always out of joint? Like you and me moreover ...

I will go on endlessly turning around this phrase and its reasons ... 2. That said, allow me to declare that everything Jacques Derrida will have given to be thought, in the movement of the deconstructions whose stakes he will have constantly raised, is directly political in its cause or its effect, including the apparently autobiographical texts or those that intersect with psychoanalysis or literature.

Voix You

Several parerga, outworks, dedicated to the voyou that he is, and that I am, to the rogue-that-I-am/follow, the voyou-que-je-suis as he would say by antonomasis, cautiously and slyly, drawing right away from two French words-je suis-a philosophy of the equivocal.

Parerga of the twenty-six parerga that "precede" (but can one say "precede"?) the premises (but can one say "premises"?) of those reflections inventoried under the subtitle Crypts, encrypted under the Post-Scriptum, followed by a post-cryptum and that in fifty-two points enumerated February 28, 1994, by Jacques Derrida will have made the philosophical light required to think what comes.

To accomplish here my role as Prologue, it would suffice that I read you the powerful pages from "Faith and Knowledge" where Jacques Derrida will have assembled everything needed to think "Jacques Derrida and Politics or the Political": everything-and the rest, naturally.

If I choose "Faith and Knowledge" today, it is (1) by chance, (2) by economic calculation, (3) while resuscitating one of our conversations, which dates from January 1993 (1994) 1995-whose echo I will let you hear in a moment.

Let's say that it is apropos "Religion," Faith, and Knowledge that one time, on an island, site of the philosophical dream par excellence, Jacques Derrida will have, one time among countless others, given the political to be thought, what there will be to think for still longer than more than one century, by linking right away, on this occasion "the question of religion to that of the evil of abstraction" and

to radical abstraction. Not to the abstract figure of death, of evil or of the sickness of death, but to the forms of evil that are traditionally tied to radical extirpation and therefore to the deracination of abstraction, passing by way-but only much later-of those sites of abstraction that are the machine, technics, technoscience, and above all the transcendence of tele-technology. "Religion and mechane," religion and cyberspace," "religion and the numeric," "religion and the digital," "religion and virtual space-time": in order to take the measure of these themes in a short treatise, within the limits assigned to us, to conceive a small discursive machine that, however, finite and perfectible, would not be too powerless.

Please pardon the Prologue that I am for "adding" to this and even piling it on.

-If I do so it is because one must always repeat the message, relaunch the thinking, since mortals have a short memory.

So as to rule out from the start the sort of discourse I hear circulating here and there, and that claims-whether out of navet, bad faith, or dimness-that Jacques Derrida is not, has not always been, would not have always been "political," whereas from the first trace of his thinking, just as from the first trace on his body, which will have made him the poison-gift of the inevitability of the poison-gift, of the wound, the traumatism, as what presides over cultural, political destiny ... etc. of every being. Thus, with the first trace of the thinking of the trace in Of Grammatology, the whole machine that tends to replace the word "writing" in the ordinary sense by "trace" or the word "speech" by trace, had as its final purpose that writing, speech, trace are not the proper characteristic of the human. There is animal trace, animals write. From the beginning, the deconstruction of the properly human, and thus of its empire, its rights, is in place. Jacques...