Dialogue, pluralism, and change: The intertextual constitution of Bakhtin, Kristeva, and Derrida

Res Publica

Volumn 13, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 415-440

  Vargova, Mariela ^a  

^a NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH   (United States)

Author keywords

Constitutional interpretation; Constitutionalism; Democratization; Emancipatory transformation; Intertextuality; Social pluralism

Indexed keywords

EID: 36649008356     PISSN: 13564765     EISSN: 15728692     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/s11158-007-9042-y     Document Type: Article

References (86)

1. Ever since the constitutional revolutions of the eighteenth century, modern constitutional theory has conceived of a constitution as a fundamental set of principles and institutional arrangements aiming to restrict arbitrary power and ensure 'limited government' (See Giovanni Sartori, 'Constitutionalism: A Preliminary Discussion', The American Political Science Review 56/4 (1962) 853-864, p. 855).
2. Preoccupied with the need to guarantee political and normative stability, the traditional constitutional approach has sought to establish an enduring institutional order that is beyond the reach of everyday democratic activities and pluralist social life. It has viewed the constitution as a constricted and formal institution, which is detached from, citizens' ordinary democratic practices. (See Graham Maddox, 'A Note on the Meaning of 'Constitution,' The American Political Science Review 76/4 (1982) 805-809).
3. In England, there is no written constitution and no formal separation between constitutional and normal legislation. Yet, as constitutional scholar A. V. Dicey asserts, 'it is a mistake to think that the whole law of the English constitution might not be reduced to writing and be enacted in the form of constitutional code.' See A.V. Dicey, Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd, 1939), pp. 90-91.
4. Even progressive constitutional theories such as those of Bruce Ackerman, John Rawls, and Jurgen Habermas, among others, differentiate between higher constitutional textuality and ordinary political interpretative practices. See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993);
5. Bruce Ackerman, We the People. Volume 1: Foundations (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991);
6. and Jurgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999).
7. Keith E. Whittington, 'How to Read the Constitution: self-Government and the Jurisprudence of Originalism', First Principles Series, The Heritage Foundation, No.5, (2006) 1-13, pp.1-5.
8. See also Amy Kapczynski, 'Historicism, Progress, and the Redemptive Constitution', Cardozo Law Review 26/3 (2005) 1041-1118, p. 1061,
9. and Natalie Stoljar, 'Survey Article: Interpretation, Indeterminacy and Authority: Some Recent Controversies in the Philosophy of Law', Journal of Political Philosophy 11/4 (2003) 470-498, p. 472.
10. Similarly, Natalie Stoljar presents poststructuralist and deconstructive approaches to legal interpretation under the name of 'critical theories' and stresses that these approaches share the idea that '[t]here are no authoritative interpretations because interpretations (as well as laws and legal institutions) are mere "perspectives", typically perspectives that perpetuate dominant ideologies and power structures.' Ibid., p. 493.
11. Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. ix.
12. Mikhail Bakhtin, 'Discourse in the Novel', in his The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 259-422.
13. Ibid., p. 344.
14. Ibid., p. 342.
15. Ibid., p. 343.
16. Ibid., p. 344.
17. Graham Allen, Intertextuality (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 24.
18. Julia Kristeva, 'Word, Dialogue, and Novel', in Leon S. Roudiez (ed), Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 64-91, p. 77.
19. Ibid., p. 77.
20. Ibid., p. 77.
21. Ibid., p. 78.
22. Bakhtin, op. cit., p. 345.
23. Ibid., pp. 324-327.
24. Ibid., p. 346.
25. Ibid., p. 263.
26. Ibid., p. 292.
27. Ibid., p. 291.
28. Allen, op. cit., p. 27.
29. Kristeva, op. cit., p. 66.
30. Julia Kristeva, 'The Bounded Text', in Leon S. Roudiez (ed), Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp. 36-63, p. 36. In the following analysis, I restrict my interpretation and employment of Kristeva's concept of intertextuality to her interpretation of Bakhtin's translinguistics and to her, as I call it, pre-psychoanalytic turn of textual interpretation presented in some of her early scholarly work.
31. Kristeva, 'word, Dialogue and Novel', p. 70.
32. Ibid., p. 81.
33. Ibid., pp. 83-84. As Graham Allen observes, for Kristeva, the dialogic texts are arenas for struggles that aim to subvert 'the belief in the unity of meaning or of the human subject... all ideas of the logical and the unquestionable.' See Allen, op. cit., p. 45.
34. Kristeva, 'The Bounded Text', pp. 36-37.
35. Julia Kristeva, 'Semiotics: A Critical Science and/or a Critique of Science', in Toril Moi (ed), The Kristeva Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 74-88, p. 87.
36. Noelle McAfee, Habermas, Kristeva, and Citizenship (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), p. 69.
37. Ross Mitchell Guberman (ed), Julia Kristeva Interviews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 26.
38. See the Constitution Act, 1982, http://laws.ju.stice.gc.ca/en/const/ annex_e.html. (Accessed 20 June 2007). In addition, I want to point out that there are other constitutional texts that recognize linguistic diversity only as a matter of territorial priority and protection. A third group of constitutions promote linguistic pluralism at the level of institutional structures of the state.
39. Richard Bellamy and Dario Castiglione also question the rigid boundaries between constitutional politics and normal political processes. Their notion of 'political constitutionalism' aims to offer 'a more differentiated appreciation of the nature of democratic decision making', which places the political constitution with its system of basic rights and liberties within ordinary political processes. See Richard Bellamy and Dario Castiglione, 'Constitutionalism and Democracy - Political Theory and the American Constitution', British Journal of Political Science 27/4 (1997) 595-618.
40. Vivien Hart, 'Constitution-Making and the Transformation of Conflict', Peace & Change, 26/2 (2001) 153-176, p. 158, p. 153.
41. Ibid., p. 157.
42. Jacques Derrida, 'Force of Law: The "Mystical Foundation of Authority'" in Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, David Gray Carlson (eds), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 3-67. Derrida's approach of deconstructive interrogation or 'deconstructive line of questioning' means, in his words, 'destabilizing, complicating, or bringing out paradoxes of values.' For Derrida, deconstruction is 'through and through a problematization of law and justice,' it is 'a problematization of the foundations of law, morality and politics.' (p. 8).
43. Ibid., p. 24.
44. Ibid., p. 13.
45. Ibid., p. 38.
46. John McCormick, 'Derrida on Law: Or, Poststructuralism Gets Serious', Political Theory 29/3 (2001) 395-423, p. 402.
47. Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 23.
48. Derrida, 'Force of Law', p. 36.
49. McCormick, op. cit., p. 399.
50. Derrida, op. cit., p. 14.
51. On the future-oriented character of Derrida's judgment, see the analyses of Nancy Fraser, 'The Force of Law: Metaphysical or Political?', Cardozo Law Review 13/4 (1991) 1325-1331, p. 1326;
52. Drucilla Cornell, 'Time, Deconstruction, and the Challenge to Legal Positivism: The Call for Judicial Responsibility', Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 11/1 (1990) 267-297, p. 268;
53. Matthias Fritsch, 'Derrida's Democracy to Come', Constellations 9/4 (2002) 574-597.
54. Jacques Derrida, 'Deconstructions: The Im-possible', in Sylvère Lotringer and Sande Cohen (eds), French Theory in America (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 27.
55. Ibid., pp. 27-28.
56. Derrida, 'Force of Law', p. 23.
57. Ibid., p. 24.
58. McCormick, op. cit., p. 403.
59. Ibid., op. cit., p. 20.
60. Ibid, p. 28. For such a reading of Derrida's deconstructive approach as transformative and emancipatory to politics and law, see Saul Newman, 'Derrida's Deconstruction of Authority', Philosophy and Social Criticism 27/3 (2001), 1-20, pp. 15-17;
61. Simon Critchley, 'Remarks on Derrida and Habermas', Constellations 7/4 (2000), 455-465, pp. 456-457;
62. Fritsch, op. cit., pp. 574-597;
63. and Fraser, op. cit., p. 1326.
64. Derrida, 'Force of Law', p. 27.
65. Ibid., pp. 27-28.
66. Ibid., pp. 28-29.
67. Julia Kristeva, 'Word, Dialogue, and Novel', in Leon S. Rodiez (ed), op. cit., p. 89.
68. Leon S. Roudiez: 'Introduction' in roudiez, op. cit., p. 17 (my italics).
69. Kristeva, op. cit., p. 81.
70. Ibid., p. 71.
71. Ibid., p. 71.
72. Guberman, op. cit., p. 37.
73. Ibid., p. 37.
74. Ibid., p. 37.
75. Derrida, 'Force of Law', p. 20.
76. Ibid., p. 37.
77. Ibid., p. 38.
78. McCormick, op. cit., p. 403.
79. Derrida, op. cit., p. 23.
80. Ibid., p. 38.
81. Newman, op. cit., pp. 15-16.
82. Cornell, op. cit., p. 268.
83. See Newman, op. cit., p. 5. Also, Nancy Fraser argues against interpretations of Derrida's deconstruction as entailing nihilism. See Nancy Fraser, op. cit., p. 1326. See also Simon Critchley, op. cit., p. 455.
84. Derrida, op. cit., p. 41.
85. Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the 'Postsocialist' Condition (New York: Routledge, 1.997), p. 162. Fraser argues that such a transgressive attitude is particularly problematic in feminist politics 'which requires ethical distinctions between oppressive and emancipatory social norms.' (p. 162).
86. Michel Rosenfeld, Just Interpretations: Law between Ethics and Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). For instance, Rosenfeld remarks that indeterminacy can also lead to the imposition of arbitrary meanings by those with greatest power or cunning in society, (p. 19).