concepts, themes, and so on; these are the conceptual dynamics that gave rise to the “mad” experience of the aporia—a type of “madness of the impossible”—that engenders the ethical demand to think and act more justly in the world.23
We may be justified, perhaps, in wondering how the experience of undecidability is a matter of “justice.” We might ask how, for instance, Derrida’s understanding of the experience of the impossible possibility gives rise to the sense of responsibility that leads him to believe that “deconstruction is justice”?24 How does a Derridean approach to deconstruction act for the sake of justice? Though these questions take root in various places throughout Derrida’s corpus, his responses to them are fundamentally shaped by his reading of Levinas’s work (notably in his essay “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’”25 ), with a Levinasian notion of ethicality directly informing the sense of responsibility that powers Derridean deconstruction. Critchley, too, in Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas and Contemporary French Thought (1999), investigates the relationship between the work of Derrida and Levinas:
Derrida paradoxically defines justice as an experience of that which we are not able to experience, which is qualified as “the mystical,” “the impossible,” or “aporia” [. . .] justice in an “experience” of the undecidable. However, and this is crucial, such an undecidable experience of justice does not arise in some intellectual intuition or theoretical deduction, rather it always arises in relation to a particular entity, to the singularity of the other [. . .] that is to say, justice arises in the particular and non-subsumptive relation to the Other, as a response to suffering that demands an infinite responsibility.26
Here, Critchley highlights Derrida’s theoretical indebtedness to Levinas, a thinker known for his idiosyncratic notion of alterity and his understandings of ethics as first philosophy. Critchley draws our attention to the ways in which a Derridean understanding of undecidability—in its “relation to a particular entity, to the singularity of the other”—is shaped by a Levinasian notion of otherness, whereby—for Levinas—the “face” of the Other is that which “governs me, whose infinity I cannot thematize and whose hostage I remain.”27 This is an ethically charged conceptualization of alterity, one which Critchley suggests generates a “pre-reflective sentient disposition towards the Other’s suffering that [forms] a basis for ethics and responsibility.”28 This is an ethic that Derrida carries into his approach to deconstruction; specifically, it is an Other-oriented sense of ethics that forms the beating heart of his notion of justice.
Differing from the sense of justice associated with the law (as droit), the justice of Derridean deconstruction aligns with Levinas’s notion of la droiture de l’accueil fait au visage,29 or—as translated by Derrida—“the equitable honoring of faces.”30 Though Derrida’s translation of this excerpt is sometimes contested,31 this is a conceptualization of justice animated by an infinite responsibility to the (unknown) Other, a form of concern for a singular being who is always—though this figure might not be present in the world—owed respect and an equity of treatment. This is an obligation to the ipseity of the Other—someone whose appearance Derrida describes in Levinasian terms as the “arrival” of “God”32 —that he associates with our movement toward and through the aporetic experience engendered during moments of undecidability, which is to say, an injunction to extend as far as humanly possible our care, concern, love, and so on to all whom appear before us. Informed by this infinite, unceasing demand to act responsibly in the “face” of the (unknown) Other, deconstruction is thus—arguably—a characteristically Other-centric form of philosophic action. A type of Other-oriented mode of thought, deconstruction, is performed for the sake of the Other and a more just treatment of them. I use the word “them” here because the “Other” is both a singular being, and yet, not representative of a singular person at all, but rather the multitude of all humanity. Not unlike the notion of “dying to the self” found in the Christian tradition of faith, which demands a relinquishment of a self-centric existence and the putting into practice of a radical sense of beingness toward the infinite (God); a Levinasian understanding of acting responsibly toward the (unknown) Other is a call of and for a justice which is ultimately unfathomable, without limits, and free from any worldly conditions.
But what are the political implications of such a radically Other-oriented ethics? How can this transcendental notion of justice, as it relates to deconstruction, cultivate new spaces and forms of democratic action? That is, in what ways—if at all possible—does this extreme form of ethics conserve and enhance “the political”? With these questions in mind, I turn my attention to Derrida’s deconstructions of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism, proceeding on the conceptual grounds that his approach offers a “concrete intervention in contexts” that is “governed” by a radical “concern for justice.” I go forward with the belief that Derrida’s approach—because of the ways in which it operates, as Critchley observes, in a “quasi-transcendental register”33 —arguably neglects to account adequately for the political necessity of thinking and acting caringly for that which is shared with the “Other”: the “world.”
Corresponding with Derrida’s turn to more thoroughly ethical and political topics in the 1990s, his examination of forgiveness offers a “concrete” philosophic intervention during a period when humanity saw “the proliferation of scenes of repentances or of asking ‘forgiveness.’”34 Against this backdrop, he saw it necessary to critique how forgiveness—a decidedly Judeo-Christian notion—was being practiced and instrumentalized by individuals and groups from all across the (international) political spectrum, as well as individuals and nongovernmental actors from across (global) civil society. Acting into this “context,” which must be understood here in a double sense, as both the so-called real world where human affairs are taking place, and the all-encompassing “text” within which all meanings are ascribed, Derrida’s reflections on forgiveness offer a deconstructive critique—a “conceptual genealogy”—of a notion with conceptual roots extending deep into the Western tradition of thought: investigating how this idea has been understood and practiced throughout human history.
Contending that there is not “anything secular in our time,”35 Derrida argues that the contemporary world exists within a state of “globalatinisation [which] takes into account the effect of Roman Catholicism [that] today overdetermines all language of law, of politics, and even the interpretation of what is called the ‘return of the religious.’”36 Underscoring the hegemonic influence that religion has had on human existence in the West, Derrida suggests that forgiveness is an idea that is inseparable from its foundations in Christian teachings. In this way, his thinking is in line with that of Arendt when she writes:
The discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was Jesus of Nazareth. The fact that he made this discovery in a religious context and articulated it in religious language is no reason to take it any less seriously in a strictly secular sense.37
Derrida, who maintains that even the notion of “the secular” is a religious one,38 consequently affirms Arendt’s understanding that the religious foundations of the concept of forgiveness are significant, but do not prevent its being theorized/practiced in secular contexts. Although the tendency in the contemporary (international) political arena—both scholastically and practically—is to separate the secular from the non-secular, attempting to ground the doing of politics in nonreligious terms, this is not entirely possible when considering forgiveness, as the influence of Judeo-Christian precepts to the practice of this particular notion are undeniable. Secular scholars who study, and practitioners who do politics, therefore ought not be thwarted by the rootedness of forgiveness in Christian theology, though they must take into account how this “pearl” has been “crystallized” in terms of the ethics outlined within this tradition of faith.
