Derrida and the ethics of the im-possible

Research in Phenomenology

Volumn 38, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 270-290

  Raffoul, François ^a  

^a LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Aporia; Ethics; Hospitality; Responsibility; The impossible

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149187878     PISSN: 00855553     EISSN: 15691640     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1163/156916408X287003     Document Type: Article

References (37)

1. Jacques Derrida, "Jacques Derrida, penseur de l'évè nement" [Jacques Derrida, Thinker of the Event], interview by Jérôme-Alexandre Nielsberg, l'Humanité, January 28, 2004, http://www. humanite.fr/2004-01-28-Tribune-libre-Jacques-Derrida-penseur-de-l- evenement. (All translations are mine.)
2. Following here the contrast made by Derrida between problem (problēma) and aporia in Aporias (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 11-13. Hererafter cited as A, followed by page number.
3. in Adieu, Derrida narrates how Levinas once confided in him the following: "You know, one often speaks of ethics to describe what I do, but what interests me in the end is not ethics, but the holy, the holiness of the holy" (Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas [Paris: Galilée, Paris, 1997], 15.
4. Derrida would then speak of "hyper-ethics" (for instance in Voyous [Paris: Galilée, 2003], 210; hereafter cited as V; translations mine) or of a hyperbolic ediics, following Levinas. At this juncture in this article, let us simply note this similar movement in Levinas and Derrida of an exceeding of ethics towards its ethicality, its possibility, which Derrida will understand as aporetic.
5. Jacques Derrida, "Passions," in On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 16. Hereafter cited as P, followed by the page number.
6. Jacques Derrida. Dire l'événement, est-ce possible? (with Gad Soussana and Alexis Nouss) (Paris: L' Harmattan, 2001), 98. Hereafter cited as DE; translations mine.
7. See Jacques Derrida, Papier Machine (Paris: Galilée, 2001), 291. Hereafter cited as PM;
8. translations mine. In Voyous, Derrida insists that "it is a question of an other thinking of the possible (of power, of the masterful and sovereign 'I can', of selfhood itself) and of an im-possible that would not only be negative" (V 197).
9. PM 292, 307.
10. Interview with l'Humanité. Ethics must do the impossible: To forgive can only happen where it is impossible to forgive; the gift, "if it is, if it is possible, must appear as impossible" (DE 93).
11. Derrida even adds: "The gift is impossible, and can only be possible as impossible"; hospitality must welcome unconditionally (which is impossible), responsible decision must judge without rules and without knowing how, etc. Each time, ethics can only happen as impossible. The impossible is the very possibility of ethics.
12. Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1953), 262;
13. Translated by Joan Stambaugh as Being and Time (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996), 242. Hereafter cited as SZ, for the German pagination, and BT, for English pagination.
14. And already in paragraph 50: "Death is the possibility of the pure and simple impossibility of Dasein" (SZ 250/BT 232; translation modified). In Derrida's words, "Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein" (A 69).
15. In Aparias, Derrida identifies two senses of the possible in Being and Time: first, "the sense of the virtuality or of the imminence of the future," and second, the sense "of the possible as that of which I am capable, that for which I have the power, the ability, or the potentiality," and he concludes that "these two meanings of possibility co-exist in die Möglichkeit" (A 62). I would thus suggest a third sense, which is precisely the opposite of the second sense, i.e., the possible as being exposed (passivity) to the possibility of... death: I can die (mortal) because I am exposed to deadi.
16. Jacques Derrida, Philosophy in a Time of Terror (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 90. Hereafter cited as PTT, followed by page number.
17. On this point, I cake the liberty of referring the reader to my Heidegger and the Subject (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1999).
18. Einleitung in die Philosophie (Wintersemester 1928/29), vol. 27 of Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1996), 340; my emphasis.
19. Hereafter cited as GA 27, followed by page number.
20. On this point, see Françoise Dastur's judicious comments in Derrida, special issue of Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, no. 1 (January 2007): 19-20.
21. "Since the origin of authority, the foundation or ground, the position of the law can't by definition rest on anything but themselves, they are themselves a violence without ground" ("Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority,'" in Deconstruction and the Possibility of justice, ed. D. G. Carlson, D. Cornell, and M. Rosenfeld [New York: Routledge, 1992], 14). Hereafter cited as MFA, followed by the page number.
22. See "Non pas l'utopie, l'im-possible," in PM 358.
23. One will compare here Derrida's undecidable with Heidegger's decidedness (Entschiendenheit), and generally with Heidegger's treatment of decision in Beiträge zur Philosophie, where it is said that the greatest danger, the most certain sign of nihilistic machination, is to believe matters decided, hence the "lack of distress" that is the most distressful of all. The decided (lack of distress as utmost distress) has to be returned to the undecided (distress), so as to bring out decidedness as such. Being is what is at stake in the decision, and decision is about nothing but Being. What is at issue in the decision is the decisive, i.e., being. As Heidegger puts it, decision [Entscheidung] "means already decidedness [Entschiendenheit]" (Contributions to Philosophy, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly [Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999], 70). The issue is that Derrida remains, if to exceed it towards the other, in the egological tradition of decision, whereas Heidegger thinks decision outside of egology altogether, arising out of the truth of be-ing itself.
24. Jacques Derrida, "Autrui est secret parce qu'il est autre" [Autrui is secret because it is another], interview by Antoine Spire, Le Monde de l'Education (July - August 2001), www.lemonde.fr/ mde/ete2001 /derrida. html.
25. "For me the undecidable is the condition of decision, of the event" (Sur Parole [Paris, Editions de l'Aube, 1999], 52). Hereafter cited as SP.
26. In A Taste for the Secret, ed. G. Donis and D. Webb (Maiden, MA: Polity Press, 2001), 61, he maintained that, "the moment of decision, and thus the moment of responsibility, supposes a rupture with knowledge, and therefore an opening to the incalculable," Hereafter cited as TS, followed by page number.
27. An expression one also finds for instance in V 210.
28. One also finds this expression of a decision of the other in me in "Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida," in Questioning Ethics, ed. R. Kearney and M. Dooley (New York: Routledge, 1999), 67. Hereafter cited as QE.
29. Jacques Derrida. "The 'World' of the Enlightenment to Come," Research in Phenomenology 33 (2003): 35.
30. V, 198. "If only what is already possible, that is, expected and anticipated, happens, this is not an event. The event is possible only when come from the impossible. It happens (arrive) as the advent of the impossible" (PM 285).
31. This term, l'arrivant, literally the arriving one, echoes Heidegger's term that one finds in his "Letter on Humanism" of the avenant (Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. D. F. Krell, rev. and expanded ed. [San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993], 264). The avenant plays on adventure but mostly on the one who is coming, the to-come. As the editor of Basic Writings, David Farrell Krell, notes, "L'avenant (cf. The English advenient) is most often used as an adverbial phrase, à l'avenant, to be in accord, conformity, or relation to something. It is related to l'aventure, the arrival of some unforeseen challenge, and l'avenir, the future, literally, what is to come" (Basic Writings, 264).
32. Being "arrives" or "presences." I am grateful to David Krell for reminding me that the term "l'avenant" was originally in Jean Beaufret's letter to Heidegger. In a footnote in Aporias (A 86 n. 14), Derrida mentions that, "after the fact," he had recalled a 1977 play by Helene Cixous called, precisely, "l'arrivante." The arriving one was thus initially feminine.
33. Adieu 94.
34. On Derrida's reservations with respect to the notion of tolerance, its dogmatism and relativism, see TS 62-64.
35. On this point, see my "The Subject of the Welcome," Symposium: Journal of the Canadian Society for Hermeneutics and Postmodern Thought 2, no. 2 (1998): 211-22.
36. DE 97.
37. In PTT 90, Derrida would describe the surprise of the event is this way: "The event is what comes and, in coming, comes to surprise me, to surprise and to suspend comprehension: The event is first of all that which I do not first of all comprehend. Better, the event is first of all that 1 do not comprehend. The fact that I do not comprehend: my incomprehension". One will of course refer such incomprehension to the not-knowing of the moment of decison.