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Arendt, The Human Condition, 243.

Chapter 1

       Derrida

       On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness

      In On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (2001), a text that was published as part of Simon Critchley and Richard Kearney’s co-edited book series, “Thinking in Action,” Derrida critiques global political affairs through his deconstructions of the notions of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism.¹ The text is comprised of two distinct sections, the first is based on an address given to the International Parliament of Writers in Strasbourg (1996)—a speech entitled, Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort!—and the second is based on answers Derrida gave in an interview on the subject of forgiveness for the French journal Le Monde des débats (December 1999). Presenting deconstructions of two ideas with conceptual roots deep in le héritage, which is to say, the Western tradition, Derrida responds—with his distinctive philosophic approach—to events and phenomenon taking place around the globe.

      In the first part of his book, Derrida critically evaluates the legacy of cosmopolitan thought, doing so not simply as an exercise in abstract theorizing, but in the mode of a pointed criticism of the rising anti-immigrant sensibility in France during the 1980s and 1990s.² The second part of the book presents his deconstruction of the notion of forgiveness, in a manner congruent with his examination of cosmopolitanism, calling into question instances of political (re)conciliatory action that were, increasingly, a prominent part of global public life. Because it was “not only individuals, but also entire communities, professional corporations, the representatives of ecclesiastical hierarchies, sovereigns, and heads of state” who were now asking for “forgiveness,” Derrida saw fit to deconstruct the concept of forgiveness as a means of critically considering its association with the cases of repentance, confession, and apology that were “multiplying” on the “geopolitical scene” during the final years of the twentieth century.³ More than a form of detached, apolitical analysis, the deconstructivist approach practiced by Derrida in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness reveals the conceptual underpinnings supporting these two notions in a manner that allows him to engage actively—or to intervene philosophically—in global political affairs.

      What precisely, however, does Derrida mean when he speaks and writes about “deconstruction”? And in what ways, specifically, does this form of philosophic thought allow him to take action, and to intervene ethically and politically in the realm of human affairs? At first glance, we might wonder whether—given the similarities between Derrida’s notion of deconstruction and Heidegger’s practice of reading the history of Western metaphysics destructively (as in Destruktion)—a deconstructivist approach is incommensurable with a care-centric mode of thought, especially one which prioritizes the conservation and re-construction of the world within which we live, move, and act politically. Furthermore, in concluding that the purpose of deconstruction is not simply to destroy ideas, concepts, themes, and so on in what ways does it facilitate more positive, regenerative action? How does a Derridean deconstruction of cosmopolitanism and forgiveness contribute to the (re)creation of what might be considered a better—arguably more just—world through its thoroughly critical, destructive mode of engaging with the basic structures, concepts, and beliefs that inform, constitute, and condition the human experience of being in the world? It is in seeking answers to these questions that I begin my reflections on cosmopolitanism and forgiveness, doing so not because there is a need to rethink the practice of deconstruction in and of itself, but because a Derridean deconstructivist approach reveals the conceptual logic undergirding each of these notions: informing the Derridean experience of justice that I reconsider in terms of the “world.”

      Divided into three sections, I first provide an overview of Derrida’s deconstructive approach, before turning to his deconstructions of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism specifically. Accordingly, section one highlights how deconstruction is a genealogical form of criticism animated by a hyperbolic sense of justice. The second and third sections of this chapter investigate the conceptual logics inherent to the notions of forgiveness and cosmopolitanism, respectively, with Derrida’s deconstructions facilitating an exposition of the binary oppositions that undergird each of these ideas. These are the aporetic binaries that inform the underlying conceptual dynamics which I theorize throughout the remainder of this book—Arendt’s body of thought serving as a compass with which to navigate the ethico-political terrain uncovered by deconstruction. Responding to the series of aporias disclosed by Derrida’s deconstructivist account of cosmopolitanism and forgiveness, I fashion a theory of political action shaped by Arendt’s notion of “care for the world.”

1. Derrida, Deconstruction, and “Undecidability”

      Rejecting the existence of a rigid divide between theory and practice,⁴ Derrida’s philosophic project of deconstruction—a form of thinking in action—“aspires to change things and to intervene [. . .] in what one calls the cité, the polis, and more generally the world.”⁵ Not unlike the philosophy of praxis outlined within Marxist thought, according to which philosophic interventions do not simply interpret the world but seek to change it, deconstruction can be understood as a type of “performative interpretation” that puts thinking into action in a manner that demands, as Marx writes, “a ruthless criticism of everything existing.”⁶ As a form of “ruthless criticism,” deconstruction puts into practice a characteristically active mode of critical philosophic inquiry, one which is animated by a hyperbolic sense of justice. It is, as Critchley and Kearney observe, a “concrete intervention in contexts that is governed by an undeconstructable concern for justice.”⁷ Though it has long been acknowledged—both by Derrida himself and by scholars of his work—that defining deconstruction poses certain intrinsic challenges, perhaps even proving to be impossible because of the ways in which the word “deconstruction” itself “acquires its value only from its inscription in a chain of possible substitutions,”⁸ Critchley and Kearney’s description of the Derridean approach provides a sturdy foundation upon which to develop our thinking about this form of “ruthless criticism” in two primary ways.

      First, to frame how Derrida understands the complex web of meaning that supports and structures all of human existence, Critchley and Kearney underscore that deconstruction is an “intervention in contexts.” This notion of “context” is significant for a Derridean conceptualization of human existence because he understands the world as “text,” which—as he writes in Limited Inc (1988)—is “limited neither to the graphic, nor to the book, nor even to discourse, and even less to the semantic, representation, symbolic, ideal, or ideological sphere.”⁹ What he describes as “text” implies all “structures called ‘real,’ ‘economic,’ ‘historical,’ socio-institutional, in short: all possible referents.”¹⁰ Including “all possible referents,” and thus referring to the entire semiological system of signs and their correlates, the “text” is the linguistic system of writing—more specifically what he describes as “archi-écriture” (or arche-writing)—that encapsulates all of human affairs. This conceptualization of textuality and (arche-)writing—with its ontological claim that the present is shaped by a play of “différance,” according to which “language, or any code, any system of referral in general, is constituted ‘historically’ as a weave of differences”¹¹ —gives rise to the now infamous notion that “il n’y a pas de hors-texte.”¹² Though the suggestion that “there is nothing outside the text”—or, alternatively translated, that “there is no outside-text”—has garnered much criticism from thinkers such as Michel Foucault and John Searle, it is—for Derrida—but another means of saying that “there is nothing outside context.”¹³ The etymological root, derived from the Latin “con,” meaning “together” or “with,” and “texere,” to “weave, to make, to fabricate,” gives us a definition in the Oxford English Dictionary of

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