At the intersection: Kant, Derrida, and the relation between ethics and politics

Political Theory

Volumn 35, Issue 6, 2007, Pages 781-805

  La Caze, Marguerite ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND   (Australia)

Author keywords

Derrida; Duties; Ethics; Kant; Politics

Indexed keywords

EID: 35649009979     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: 15527476     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591707307324     Document Type: Article

References (119)

1. Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 8:37.
2. Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 115.
3. See, for example, Christopher Norris, What's Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1990), 194-207, for a discussion of Derrida's relation to Kant's epistemological project;
4. Irene Harvey, Derrida and The Economy of Différance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), who is concerned with the influence of Kant's notion of critique and conception of the limits of reason;
5. and Philip Rothfield, ed., Kant after Derrida (Manchester, UK: Clinamen, 2003), which is a collection of essays on a range of Kantian themes.
6. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997);
7. and Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London: Routledge, 2001).
8. Jacques Derrida, Questioning God, ed. John Caputo, Mark Dooley, and Michael J. Scanlon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 66.
9. Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, 115.
10. Levinas's influence on Derrida's ethics has been explored more thoroughly than Kant's. This work includes Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1999);
11. Simon Critchley, Ethics, Politics, and Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas, and Contemporary French Thought (London: Verso, 1999);
12. Diane Perpich, "A Singular Justice: Ethics and Politics between Levinas and Derrida," Philosophy Today 42, supp. (1998): 59-70;
13. and Miriam Bankovsky, "Derrida Brings Levinas to Kant: The Welcome, Ethics, and Cosmopolitical Law," Philosophy Today 49, no. 2 (2005): 156-71, who also considers the relation of both to Kant.
14. Derrida discusses Levinas in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2001);
15. and in Derrida, Adieu to Emanuel Levinas.
16. On Kant and Derrida on hospitality, see Marguerite La Caze, "Not Just Visitors: Cosmopolitanism, Hospitality, and Refugees," Philosophy Today 48, no. 3 (2004): 313-24.
17. Beards worth analyses the relation between Kant and Derrida on law and violence in Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political (London: Routledge 1996), 46-70.
18. I prefer the term ethics to morality as it seems less focused on individual mores to the contemporary ear.
19. Immanuel Kant, "Toward Perpetual Peace," in Kant, Practical Philosophy, 8:380.
20. This position follows from his view that ought to implies can in Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, in Kant, Practical Philosophy.
21. Kant says that our awareness of the moral law when we construct maxims of the will leads us to the concept of freedom. Furthermore, our experience confirms this concept of freedom when we remember that we can act against our strongest desires and even our love of life in order to act ethically (ibid., 5:30).
22. By contrast, in the Groundwork (in Kant, Practical Philosophy),
23. Kant argues that because we are autonomous we are bound by the moral law: 'If, therefore, freedom of the will is presupposed, morality together with its principle follows from it by mere analysis of its concept' (ibid., 4:447).
24. Elsewhere, in a review of Schulz's '[a]ttempt at an introduction to a doctrine of morals,' he asserts that without this possibility of freedom, any imperative is absurd and the only position we can adopt is fatalism (ibid., 8:13).
25. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 8:370.
26. Kant defines right as 'the sum. of the conditions under which the choice of one can be united with the choice of another in accordance with a universal law of freedom' (ibid., 6:230). He further distinguishes between natural or private right, which includes rights to property, rights to contracts, and domestic right, and public or civil right, which concerns the rights of a state, the rights of nations, and cosmopolitan right. The doctrine of virtue includes duties to ourselves and the duties to others of love and respect.
27. The doctrine of right concerns the a priori basis of ethical laws. One might disagree with Kant's view that politics is the doctrine of right put into practice and argue, for example, that ethics and politics are two separate spheres, as Arendt does in Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken, 2003), 147-58.
28. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 8:372.
29. According to Kant, the aims of moral evil are self-contradictory and self-destructive, whereas those of moral goodness are consistent and conducive to happiness, so evil gives way to the moral principle of goodness (Kant, Practical Philosophy, 8:379).
30. See Kant's discussion of radical evil in Immanuel Kant, "Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone," in Religion and Rational Theology, trans. and ed. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
31. Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley, Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1999), 70.
32. Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971-2001, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 295-314. The essay was first given as a talk in 1987.
33. Ibid., 295.
34. Ibid., 298.
35. Ibid., 301.
36. Levinas also believes that we have to negotiate between ethics and politics. Robert Bernasconi says that Levinas is not concerned to resolve conflicts between ethics and politics, yet 'the task of negotiating in practice the conflicting demands under which I find myself, involves the use of reason, that is, the third person, perspective' ; Robert Bernasconi, "The Third Party: Levinas on the Intersection of the Ethical and the Political," Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 30, no. 1 (1999): 81. In his view, while Levinas 'favors' ethics over politics, they are not in opposition for him.
37. Jacques Derrida, "Ethics and Politics Today," in Jacques Derrida, Negotiations (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 305. Both these approaches have been used in response to the taking of foreign hostages in Iraq. In that circumstance, I think it would be hard to justify a refusal to negotiate as there is not enough order for one to argue that such negotiation would 'create a precedent.'
38. Jacques Derrida, "Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority,'" trans. Mary Quaintance, in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson (London: Routledge, 1992), 14.
39. Emmanuel Levinas, Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures, trans. Gary D. Mole (London: Athlone, 1994), 46.
40. For another reading of Levinas's essay, in relation to the idea of political utopianism, see Oona Eisenstadt, "The Problem of the Promise: Derrida on Levinas on the Cities of Refuge," Cross Currents 52, no. 4 (2003): 474-82.
41. Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, 112. Levinas's idea of justice appears to be very different from Derrida's. For Derrida, justice is the ultimate ethical ideal, the undeconstructible, that goes beyond particular laws (Derrida, "Force of Law," 14). For Levinas, justice is the political necessity of weighing different competing claims, contrasted with the infinite responsibility for the particular other that is the ethical relation. In Derrida's outlook, justice takes this concern with singularity.
42. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 8:377.
43. In 'On the common saying: That may be correct in theory, but it is of no use in practice,' Kant defines the principles of a civil state as (1) the freedom of every member of the society as a human being, (2) his equality with every other as a subject, and (3) the independence of every member of a commonwealth as a citizen (ibid., 8:290);
44. and likewise in Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals
45. (in ibid., 6:314),
46. and in Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace, Kant says that the principles of a Republican state are freedom, equality, and the dependence 'of all upon a single common legislation (as subjects)' (in ibid., 8:350). A comparison of Kant's republicanism with Derrida's idea of democracy is one I do not have the space to pursue here.
47. Ibid., 8:381.
48. The second transcendental principle of public right is as follows: 'All maxims which need publicity (in order not to fail in their end) harmonize with right and politics combined' (ibid., 8:386). Kant's argument for this principle is that if maxims can only be successful through publicity, they must correspond to the universal public end, which is happiness, and for him this is what politics must do.
49. Ibid., 8:385.
50. Ibid., 8:381.
51. Ibid., 8:380.
52. There has been a great deal of interest in Kant's condemnation of rebellion here, particularly since he is a well-known supporter of the French Revolution; ibid., 6:320-23.
53. See, for example, Kimberly Hutchings, Kant, Critique, and Politics (London: Routledge, 1996), 46;
54. and Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 44-51.
55. Derrida, "Force of Law," 35.
56. Kant's examples of ethical constraints on politics between, states include the nonacquisition of existing states, the abolition of standing armies, no national debts with regard to external affairs, non-interference with the governments of other states, and not using duplicitous means in war; definitive articles recommend republicanism, for all states, a federalism of free states, and the cosmopolitan right of hospitality. Kant examines three cases of apparent conflict between politics and morals in international right and presents their resolution: where one nation promises to aid another nation but decides to release itself from the promise because of the effects that keeping the promise would have on its own well-being, where lesser nations could not make public the idea that they intend to attack a greater power preemptively, and where a large nation could not make it known that it would absorb smaller nations if it thought that necessary to its preservation (Kant, Practical Philosophy, 8:383-84). Third, Kant says that cosmopolitan right's maxims work by analogy to those of international right. Cosmopolitan right is interesting since the power imbalance between individuals and states is enormous.
57. Ibid., 8:385.
58. Another example Kant gives is that it cannot be demanded of a state that it give up its constitution even though this is a despotic one (which is, for all that, the stronger kind in relation to external enemies), so long as it runs the risk of being at once devoured by other states; hence, as for that resolution, it must also be permitted to postpone putting it into effect until a more favorable time. (Ibid., 8:373)
59. Thus, it is reasonable to wait until the state is secure from invasion before rectifying injustice if that injustice is protecting the state.
60. Elisabeth Ellis, Kant's Politics: Provisional Theory for an Uncertain World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005), 112-54.
61. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 6:347.
62. Ibid.
63. Another way Kant puts this point is that although respect 'is a mere duty of virtue, it is regarded as narrow in comparison with a duty of love, and it is the latter that is considered a wide duty';
64. ibid., 6:450.
65. Ibid., 8:301.
66. Ibid., 6:371.
67. Immanuel Kant, "Doctrine of Right," in The Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), XIX, 594-95,
68. quoted in Robert J. Dostal, "Judging Human Action: Arendt's Appropriation of Kant," Review of Metaphysics 37 (1984): 732.
69. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 8:386.
70. Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction, 200. In a later essay, Critchley presents Derrida's account of the decision more sympathetically by describing it as non-foundational but non-arbitrary and necessarily contextual;
71. Simon Critchley, "Remarks on Derrida and Habermas," Constellations 7, no. 4 (2000): 461-62.
72. Levinas, Beyond the Verse, 194.
73. Ibid., 116.
74. Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, 114-15.
75. Another way that Derrida expresses this problem is by writing, as shown above in the text, 'The hiatus, the silence of this non-response concerning the schemas between the ethical and the political, remains. It is a fact that it remains, and this fact is not some empirical contingency, it is a Faktum'
76. (ibid., 116).
77. Quoted in Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 114-15.
78. Ibid., 120.
79. Ibid., 121.
80. Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 86.
81. Critchley has a very good, albeit brief, discussion of what Derrida means by democracy to come in "Remarks on Derrida and Habermas," 463-64.
82. Jacques Derrida, Limited, Inc., ed. Gerald Graff (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press 1988), 152.
83. Ibid., 153.
84. Derrida, Rogues, 83.
85. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1986), A669-704, B697-732.
86. Ibid., A686, B714.
87. Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 134. Derrida also says he hesitates to conflate his idea of justice with a Kantian regulative idea (Derrida, "Force of Law," 25).
88. He repeats his reservations in Derrida, Rogues (83-85), in a discussion concerning democracy.
89. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 6:409.
90. Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 131-32.
91. Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness.
92. Kant's description of moral ideas in the Critique of Practical Reason also seems helpful: [I]f I understand by an idea a perfection to which nothing adequate can be given in experience, the moral ideas, are not, on that account, something transcendent, that is, something of which we cannot even determine the concept sufficiently or of which it is uncertain whether there is any object corresponding to it at all, as is the case with the ideas of speculative reason;
93. instead, the moral ideas, as archetypes of practical perfection, serve as the indispensable rule of moral conduct and also as the standard of comparison. (Kant, Practical Philosophy, 5:127). Here Kant is referring to moral virtues such as wisdom, and holiness. This idea seems quite close to Derrida's in the fact that they are impossible - nothing in experience can match them - but are not transcendent, and can be used as a standard.
94. Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmentelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 81.
95. Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 135.
96. Derrida, "Force of Law," 17.
97. Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, 117.
98. Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, 21-22;
99. and Olivia Custer, "Kant after Derrida: Inventing Oneself out of an Impossible Choice," in Rothfield, Kant after Derrida, 171-204.
100. La Caze, "Not Just Visitors."
101. See Marguerite La Caze, "Should Radical Evil Be Forgiven?" in Forensic Psychiatry: Influences of Evil, ed. Tom Mason (Totowa, N.J.: Humana Press, 2006), 273-93, where I argue that Derrida's view of forgiveness implies that the onus is on the victim to forgive, although he does not argue for it explicitly.
102. See Kant, Practical Philosophy, 6:452-55.
103. Derrida, "Force of Law," 23.
104. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 4:403. Kant observed that even experts could lack judgment in his essay on theory and practice: [T]here can be theoreticians who can never in their lives become practical because they are lacking in judgment, for example, physicians or jurists who did well in their schooling but who are at a loss when they have to give an expert opinion.
105. (Ibid., 8:275) He thinks that this is due to a lack of the 'natural talent' of judgment. But, as Kant makes clear, this difficulty in judgment applies to certain professional fields, not to ethics.
106. Ibid., 4:407-8.
107. Derrida, Rogues, 88.
108. Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 133.
109. Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, 112.
110. Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, 113-14.
111. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 6:347.
112. Ibid., 6:314-15. Kant makes a distinction between active citizens, who are independent and can vote, and passive ones, who he argues are dependent on the will of others.
113. Ibid., 6:320, 6:333.
114. Nelson Potter, "Kant and Capital Punishment Today," Journal of Value Inquiry 36, nos. 2/3 (2002): 267-82.
115. Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow ... a Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 148.
116. I do not have the space to argue for my position here, but I think it is important to indicate the points where I think Kant is misguided. Of course there are other points, such as his view of the status of wives and servants (Kant, Practical Philosophy, 6:277, 6:315), which are deeply problematic; I have only focused on two important issues.
117. Derrida and Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow, 148.
118. Arendt contends that ethics involves a concern with the self whereas politics involves a concern with the world; Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, 153. Michel Foucault believes that subjects must be free to practice ethical relations with themselves and others;
119. Michel Foucault, Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 1, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1997), 281-301.