The civic religion of social hope: A response to Simon Critchley

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 27, Issue 5, 2001, Pages 35-58

  Dooley, Mark ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN   (Ireland)

Author keywords

community; Critchley; democracy; Derrida; ethics; justice; law; Levinas; politics; religion; Rorty; sentiment; singularity; social hope

Indexed keywords

EID: 84997941853     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/019145370102700502     Document Type: Article

References (49)

1. This paper is a sequel to my ‘Private Irony vs. Social Hope: Derrida, Rorty and the Political’, which appeared in Cultural Values 3(3) (July 1999): 263–90 (Oxford: Blackwell). Both papers were written in response to the position adopted by Simon Critchley in his recent debate with Richard Rorty regarding the political utility of deconstruction.
2. See Chantal Mouffe (ed.) Deconstruction and Pragmatism (London: Routledge, 1996)
3. and Simon Critchley, ‘Metaphysics in the Dark: a Response to Richard Rorty and Ernesto Laclau’, in Political Theory 26(6) (December 1998): 803–17 (Sage).
4. Critchley's belief that Derrida's ethics and politics ought to be approached by way of Emmanuel Levinas, is given extensive treatment in his The Ethics of Deconstruction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).
5. See ‘Ethics of the Infinite: a Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas’, in Richard Kearney (ed.) Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 47–70. Upon being asked ‘Where did you ever see the ethical relation [as you describe it] practised?’ Levinas rejoins: ‘I reply that its being utopian does not prevent it from investing our everyday actions of generosity or goodwill towards the other: even the smallest and most commonplace gestures, such as saying “after you” as we sit at the dinner table or walk through a door, bear witness to the ethical.… I remember meeting once with a group of Latin American students, well versed in the terminology of Marxist liberation and terribly concerned by the suffering and unhappiness of their people in Argentina. They asked me rather impatiently if I had ever actually witnessed the utopian rapport with the other which my ethical philosophy speaks of. I replied: “Yes, indeed, here in this room”’ (p. 68).
6. Critchley, ‘Metaphysics in the Dark’, p. 803.
7. Jacques Derrida, ‘Force of Law: “The Mystical Foundations of Authority”’, in Drucilla Cornell et al. (eds) Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (New York: Routledge, 1992). For an indispensable analysis of Derrida's ‘law-justice’ distinction
8. see John D. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997)
9. and his The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). Throughout these books, Caputo endeavors to highlight the prophetic tone of much of Derrida's recent work. In a recent interview with me, to be published in my A Passion for the Impossible (forthcoming), Derrida positively celebrates Caputo's readings. He does, however, insist that he is ‘a prophet without prophecy’.
10. See also ‘Hospitality, Justice, and Responsibility: a Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’, in Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley (eds) Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 65–83.
11. Paul Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995).
12. See Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit (New York: Routledge, 1992).
13. ‘The Deconstruction of Actuality: an Interview with Jacques Derrida’, Radical Philosophy 68 (Autumn 1994): 28–41. Derrida demarcates his position from a more radical brand of postmodernism, as espoused by people such as Jean Baudrillard and Mark C. Taylor, when he comments: ‘[Deconstruction] must not create an inflation of the image, or be used to neutralize every danger by means of what might be called the trap of the trap, the delusion of delusion: a denial of events, by which everything — even violence and suffering, war and death — is said to be constructive and fictive, and constituted by and for the media, so that nothing really ever happens, only images, simulacra, and delusions’ (p. 29).
14. For Derrida's qualifications of this remark, see ‘Afterword: Toward an Ethic of Discussion’, in Jacques Derrida, Limited INC (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), pp. 136–7.
15. Jacques Derrida, ‘Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism’, in Mouffe, Deconstruction and Pragmatism, p. 86.
16. Cited by Critchley in ‘Metaphysics in the Dark’, p. 804.
17. For a further elaboration of this see Derrida, ‘Force of Law’.
18. Levinas uses the expression in the course of a critical engagement with the work of Kierkegaard. See Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Existence and Ethics’, in Jonathan Ree and Jane Chamberlain (eds) Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 32.
19. For an extended analysis of Levinas's reading of Kierkegaard, and for more on the reasons why I think it disadvantageous to push the Derrida-Levinas connection too hard, see my ‘The Politics of Exodus: Derrida, Kierkegaard, and Levinas on “Hospitality”,’ in Robert L. Perkins (ed.) International Kierkegaard Commentary: Works of Love (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2000), pp. 167–92.
20. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, p. 13.
21. For more on the theme of ‘hospitality’, see Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London: Routledge, 2001);
22. Adieu: To Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999);
23. and ‘Hospitality, Justice, and Responsibility: a Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’ in Kearney and Dooley, Questioning Ethics.
24. Richard Rorty, ‘Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism’, in Mouffe, Deconstruction and Pragmatism, pp. 13–14.
25. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, p. 8.
26. Richard Rorty, ‘Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality’, in Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Vol. III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 184.
27. Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
28. Critchley, ‘Metaphysics in the Dark’, p. 810.
29. Rorty, Achieving Our Country, p. 15, 17, 18.
30. For an example of this interpretation of Rorty, one that complements Critchley's, see John D. Caputo, ‘On Not Circumventing the Quasi-Transcendental: The Case of Rorty and Derrida’, in Gary Madison (ed.) Working Through Derrida (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), pp. 147–69.
31. I try to address Caputo's misgivings regarding Rorty's project in my ‘Prophetic Postmodernism’, in Mark Dooley (ed.) Aquinas to Derrida (forthcoming).
32. Critchley, ‘Metaphysics in the Dark’, p. 810.
33. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday, 1956), p. 174.
34. Cited in Rorty, Truth and Progress, p. 177, n. 8.
35. Richard Rorty, ‘Cosmopolitanism without Emancipation: A Reply to Jean-François Lyotard’, in Philosophical Papers I: Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 212.
36. Rorty, Achieving Our Country, p. 20.
37. Rorty, ‘Cosmopolitanism without Emancipation’, p. 214.
38. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 198.
39. Critchley, ‘Metaphysics in the Dark’, p. 30.
40. Richard Rorty, ‘Dewey Between Hegel and Darwin’, in H. Saatkamp (ed.) Rorty and Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to his Critics (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995), p. 12.
41. Reprinted in Rorty, Truth and Progress, pp. 290–306.
42. Rorty, Achieving Our Country, p. 19.
43. Rorty, Truth and Progress, p. 201.
44. Richard Rorty, ‘On Moral Obligation, Truth, and Common Sense’, in Josef Nizik and John T. Sanders (eds) Debating the State of Philosophy(London: Praeger, 1996), p. 50.
45. Richard Rorty, ‘The Communitarian Impulse’, delivered at Colorado College, 5 February 1999 (not yet Published), p. 2.
46. Richard Rorty, ‘Philosophy and the Future’, in Saatkamp, Rorty and Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to his Critics, p. 204.
47. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (Harmondsworth, Mx: Penguin, 1999), p. 87.
48. Nizik and Sanders, Debating the State of Philosophy, p. 48.
49. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, p. 238.