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Impure Beginnings

2023; Michigan State University Press; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.14321/crnewcentrevi.23.1.0029

1539-6630

Javier Burdman,

Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism

More than three decades after the fall of the communist bloc, world politics seems to lack a global horizon that can orient transformative action. With “the end of grand narratives,” as Jean-François Lyotard famously described “the postmodern condition,” no universalist ideal seems capable of inspiring the formation of social movements large and durable enough to effectively confront the pressing challenges of our time: economic inequality, racism, misogyny, global warming, and many others. Political struggles have proliferated across Western societies in recent years, but for the moment, they have not crystalized into an organized political project that can contest the hegemony of contemporary capitalism.1 This fragmentation signals a political impasse characteristic of our current, postmodern time: on the one hand, political actors tend to distrust universalist political ideals inherited from the past because of their potential complicity in longstanding forms of domination such as racism, colonialism, heteronormativity, and misogyny, and on the other, without such ideals, they seem unable to gather the necessary political will to fundamentally transform the structures on which these forms of domination rely.2 Addressing and proposing ways to overcome this political impasse represents, in my view, one of the fundamental challenges of political theory today.Can deconstruction help us address and overcome this impasse? I believe that it can, and it is my goal in this article to demonstrate this through a reading of Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx. Indeed, this text, written in response to the fall of the communist bloc and the purported “end of history” that followed from it, specifically engages with the political impasse that underlies the present time. In a typically deconstructive move, Derrida shows that this impasse is not a contingent problem to be solved, but essential to politics as such. Politics is always trapped between past projects that no longer respond to present challenges, and the need for those projects in order to make transformative action possible at all. The implication is that political actors cannot go back to old universalist ideals, nor move beyond them, but must rather mobilize them as a supplement (Derrida calls it a “ghost”) that at once enables and corrupts political action. This is what Ernesto Laclau, in a response to Derrida's text published shortly after, called “the logic of the spectre” running through it (Laclau 1996, 68–73). Although Laclau acknowledged that “anachronism is essential to spectrality” (1996, 68), he neglected the fundamental temporal structure that produces the specter to begin with. Understanding this structure, I argue, is essential for grasping both the logic of the specter and its implications for contemporary politics.In addition to mobilizing deconstruction to address what I see as one essential problem of contemporary political theory, my reading of Specters of Marx will contribute, I hope, to clarifying the political implications of deconstruction more generally. A number of scholars have claimed that deconstruction does not contain a political philosophy in any traditional sense of the term, and that its political implications consist in opening up to politics issues and questions that usually remain concealed within the discourse of philosophy.3 Given that Derrida rarely engages with political issues directly, attempting to extrapolate a political theory from deconstruction seems pointless. However, given Derrida's claim in Specters of Marx that political philosophy “structures implicitly all philosophy” (Derrida 2006, 115), it also seems unlikely that he did not consider his writings as implicitly containing some kind of political philosophy, and examining his understanding of politics in this undoubtedly political text can contribute to unpack what he himself considered this philosophy to be. This examination is important to challenge the widespread view of Derrida, along with other thinkers associated with “postmodernity,” as either unhelpful or detrimental for the development of transformative political projects. I argue that, on the contrary, deconstruction provides important resources for developing an understanding of, as well as an orientation (not a program) for, contemporary politics. For this, it will be helpful to draw a contrast with Hannah Arendt, a more explicitly political thinker whose writings also respond to the impasse of politics, but in a way that Derrida, in my view, would have found unsuccessful.Let us begin by explaining what I have called the impasse of politics, which corresponds more precisely with the impasse of political action. This impasse is to a large extent an effect of the disappointment with revolutionary politics, of which Marxism was the main ideological inspiration in the twentieth century. Revolution is a paradigmatic form of political action because it lays bare its essence: the attempt to transform social structures in a way that interrupts the normal order of things. Marx's work, especially The Communist Manifesto, is the first comprehensive theory of politics that explicitly puts revolution at the center, in the sense that it is necessary, is desirable, and constitutes the unavoidable horizon of any truly transformative political act. On the basis of this insight, Marx's thought represents an attempt to provide a justification as well as an orientation for revolutionary politics. Inspired by this thought, Marxism would become the main orienting ideology of revolutionary movements in the twentieth century. As a number of studies in the early 1990s pointed out, the decay of Marxism toward the end of the century involved a crisis of revolutionary thinking and, insofar as revolution is a paradigm of political action altogether, a crisis of politics as such.4 The impasse of politics follows from this crisis.One prominent attempt to find a way out of the impasse of politics, in response to the crisis of Marxism, is the work of Arendt. Turning to Arendt before engaging with Derrida's own response to this impasse is helpful because both authors, as we will see, put the emphasis on the temporality of political action. For both Arendt and Derrida in Specters of Marx, politics consists in a moment of interruption where what will happen cannot be derived or deduced from what has happened. In other words, politics consists in a now that disjoints past and future. Both Arendt and Derrida specifically examine this aspect of politics and diagnose an impasse of political action that stems from it. However, I argue that while Arendt remains within a certain metaphysical longing for the purity of the now, Derrida sees the now as inherently impure, and therefore as always contaminated by the past. If Arendt, as Linda Zerilli (2002) has pointed out, is concerned with recognizing the new without subordinating it to the old, Derrida, by contrast, is concerned with how the very possibility of the new depends on a certain relationship with the past.Arendt's view that revolutions are a paradigmatic form of political action is visible in her claim, at the beginning of the chapter “The Meaning of Revolution” in On Revolution, that “revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning” (1965, 21). As is well known, Arendt describes political action in The Human Condition as the human activity that is essentially concerned with beginning, in the sense of starting a new process that cannot be derived from what had happened before. In contrast to labor, which follows the cyclical movement of life, and work, which follows a series of steps to reach an end-product, the impulse to action “springs from the beginning which came into the world when we were born and to which we respond by beginning something new on our own initiative” (Arendt 1998, 177). This is why action is the only human activity that involves freedom: By acting, people free themselves from larger processes that determine their deeds. In The Human Condition, Arendt is concerned above all with action as an individual activity that discloses the actor to others in the public realm. Here, beginning is largely subordinated to disclosure as a motivating force of action, for “in acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world” (1998, 179). In On Revolution, in contrast, Arendt is concerned with action as a collective activity that is directly oriented to starting something new. Revolutions thus expose and make explicit the dimension of novelty that is inherent to political action as such.In contrast to Derrida, as we will see, Arendt is concerned with preserving the purity of this element of novelty. In this regard, Arendt defends a decidedly (and not “reluctant,” as Seyla Benhabib [2003] has famously characterized her work) modern understanding of revolution, according to which it involves the creation of an entirely new order, rather than the restoration of an older one. She claims that “the modern concept of revolution, inextricably bound up with the notion that the course of history suddenly begins anew, that an entirely new story, a story never known or told before, is about to unfold, was unknown prior to the two great revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century” (Arendt 1965, 38). Prior to the eighteenth century, following Arendt, revolutions were conceived by revolutionaries as “restorations”: Their aim was not to begin something new, but rather to restitute an order of things that had been lost. The word “revolution,” for which the original meaning is linked to the cyclical movement of stars, conveys this older meaning, producing ambiguity. Arendt is clear, however, that with the American and French revolutions, the very idea of revolution acquires an entirely new meaning: It aims at beginning something new, not at the restoration of the past. Indeed, Arendt claims that “only where this pathos of novelty is present and where novelty is connected with the idea of freedom are we entitled to speak of revolution” (1965, 34).Despite the essential link between revolution and new beginning, the usage of the term “revolution,” connected to the idea of restoration, indicates a certain ambivalence or self-misunderstanding by revolutionary actors. Indeed, Arendt claims that this usage betrays “the lack of expectation and inclination on the side of actors, who were no more prepared for anything unprecedented than were the contemporary spectators” (1965, 41). She adds that “the revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which to us appear to show all evidence of a new spirit, the spirit of the modern age, were intended to be restorations” (43). Thus, according to Arendt, revolutions are not self-conscious attempts at novelty, they do not intend to begin anew, but they produce the experience of novelty and the capacity to begin as a result of the course of events. The word “revolution” signals that the revolutionaries fail to acknowledge, at least at the outset of the revolutionary process, that they are embarking in the production of the unprecedented. Yet the ambivalence or self-misunderstanding involved in the concept of revolution does not represent, for Arendt (unlike Derrida), an essential aspect of political action. The fact that revolutionaries see their actions as aiming at restoration is explained by a fear of novelty that precludes a full understanding of their own actions: “Psychologically speaking, the experience of foundation combined with the conviction that a new story is about to unfold in history will make men ‘conservative’ rather than ‘revolutionary’” (Arendt 1965, 41).Arendt's attempt to isolate the element of novelty involved in revolution, by contrast to the restorative inclinations of revolutionaries, comes to the fore in her analysis of the American Revolution in the chapter “Foundation II: Novus Ordo Saeclorum” of On Revolution. Here, Arendt examines the tension between the new beginning involved in revolutionary action and the need for an absolute that grounds this beginning and the institutions that stem from it. Arendt celebrates the American Revolution as the one that came closest to realizing that authority in a political community does not require any legitimation beyond the act of foundation itself. Because of the long-standing influence of the Western tradition of political philosophy, however, in which the authority of the law must always proceed from a source that is prior to the law itself, the American revolutionaries still felt the need to ground their unprecedented action on an absolute. This tension is evident in the famous words “we hold these truths to be self-evident” in the Declaration of Independence, which combine the “basis of agreement between those who have embarked upon revolution, an agreement necessarily relative because related to those who enter it,” with an “absolute, namely with a truth that needs no agreement since, because of its self-evidence, it compels without argumentative demonstration or political persuasion” (1965, 192). While the “self-evidence” of the truths signals the absolute, prepolitical authority of the statement, the “we hold,” by contrast, signals that authority stems from mutual agreement. Arendt believes that only this latter source of authority can get out of the “problem of the absolute”—namely, that any prepolitical source of authority ultimately undermines constituted political authority. Political authority in the communities of American settlers did not stem from any traditional, absolute source, because “they had constituted themselves into ‘civil bodies politic,’ mutually bound themselves into an enterprise for which no other bond existed, and thus made a new beginning in the very midst of the history of Western mankind” (1965, 194).According to Arendt, political authority needs no legitimation beyond the new beginning involved in the act of foundation. Authority is a manmade construct that depends on people creating bonds by means of mutual promises. The settlers in the American colonies, Arendt claims, “had constituted themselves into ‘civil bodies politic,’ mutually bound themselves into an enterprise for which no other bond existed, and thus made a new beginning in the very midst of the history of Western mankind” (1965, 194). And although the “bondage of the tradition” led the men of the revolution to look for a new absolute, “what saved the American Revolution from this fate was neither ‘nature's God’ nor self-evident truth, but the act of foundation itself” (1965, 195–96). The authority of the act of foundation is evident in the “worship” of the Constitution: “The great measure of success the American founders could book for themselves . . . was decided the very moment when the Constitution began to be ‘worshiped’” (1965, 198). The Constitution provides stability to the body politic by referring the authority of the law to the original act of foundation, which subsequent legislation “amends” and “augments.” The important point is that, for Arendt, the success of the American Revolution, the fact that its authority was not dissolved (as in the French Revolution) by cycles of violence and terror, is due to the fact that the revolutionaries derived, however reluctantly, their authority from the act of foundation itself, and that this authority remained unchallenged by later generations.Arendt believes that situating political authority in the act of foundation, conceived as a new beginning, represents a solution to what she calls “the problem of the absolute”—which is closely connected to what I have called “the impasse of politics.” Instead of looking for a superhuman, extralegal source of authority that grounds political action, the American revolutionaries derived political authority from the act of foundation itself, and from the mutual promises that were instituted in it. She claims that “it is futile to search for an absolute to break the vicious circle in which all beginning is inevitably caught, because this ‘absolute’ lies in the very act of beginning itself” (1965, 204). In other words, it is pointless to try to derive the legitimacy of this act of beginning from any higher authority. The capacity to begin stems from the fact that “men are equipped for the logically paradoxical task of making a new beginning because they themselves are new beginnings and hence beginners,” and this is so because “human beings appear in the world by virtue of birth” (1965, 211). The authority of a revolution, the reason why the institutions that follow from it are legitimate, is grounded on the fact that human beings are beginners and can begin. Political action therefore needs no absolute to institute a “we,” because the “we” constitutes itself in the founding act itself. The capacity to begin breaks the impasse of politics by replacing the absolute with the capacity to begin.There is an evident ambiguity in Arendt's analysis between beginning either as an alternative to the absolute or as a new absolute. The quotation marks around “absolute” in Arendt's claims that the “‘absolute’ lies in the very act of beginning itself” signals this ambiguity. Clearly, the quotation marks indicate that the act of beginning has the role of the old absolute, but is not in itself an absolute. The difference, as we have seen in the previous section, is that the absolute stands above human beings as an imposition, while beginning is entirely manmade—it is the exercise of an inherently human capacity. But if the exercise of this human capacity is an unconditional source of legitimate authority, the distinction seems to make little difference. Given to people either from without or from within, authority has an undivided, uncontestable ground. The extent to which this ground, however worldly, can work as an extrapolitical source of authority that precludes, rather than facilitates, political action and speech is evident in extremist forms of originalist constitutional ideology, which appeals to the supposedly unambiguous words of foundational documents to settle political disputes. It is therefore worth asking, following a deconstructive logic, whether Arendt's turn to beginning has succeeded in getting politics out of the vicious circle of the absolute, or whether she has simply displaced it.Arendt certainly acknowledges the logical paradoxes as well as the political dangers involved in situating the source of political authority in the capacity to begin, as is clear in the relationship between beginning and principle. If the capacity to begin is its own authority, then it would seem like whatever follows from it is legitimate—it does not matter what we begin, as long as we begin it. This is why Arendt claims that “it is in the very nature of a beginning to carry with itself a measure of complete arbitrariness” (1965, 206). Yet she claims that the act of beginning carries its own limitation in what she calls a “principle,” which is “the absolute from which the beginning is to derive its own validity, and which must save it, as it were, from its inherent arbitrariness” (1965, 212). This absolute (Arendt does not use quotation marks here), however, does not precede the beginning, but “together with it, makes its appearance in the world.” The principle stems from the beginning itself: “The way the beginner starts whatever he intends to do lays down the law of action for those who have joined him in order to partake in the enterprise and to bring about its accomplishment” (1965, 212–13). This way, Arendt suggests that in order to work as a source of authority, the beginning must have the form of a principle—it must “lay down the law of action” for those who “partake in the enterprise.” By turning the beginning into a law, the principle prevents the former from falling into arbitrariness.The relationship between beginning and principles is connected to the temporality of revolutionary political action in Arendt's thought, which, as Rosalyn Diprose (2008) has pointed out, is essentially future oriented. The old absolutes conditioned revolutionary action from without, as if they had existed prior to it—the “self-evident truths” acknowledged by the American revolutionaries are prior to their acknowledgment by them. Principles, by contrast, appear with the beginning itself, and will only be prior to those who join the enterprise in the future. Arendt acknowledges that most, if not all, revolutionaries see themselves as continuators of a previous beginning, as we saw in the previous section, but she sees this restorative spirit as stemming, on the one hand, from long-standing habits of thought, and on the other, from the fear produced by facing the unprecedented. In Arendt's view, however, it is clear that the new beginning is unconstrained by anything prior to it. In her essay “The Crisis of Education,” Arendt contrasts the conservative attitude that is inherent to education, which is concerned with protecting the world, to politics, which is concerned with changing it: “In politics this conservative attitude—which accepts the world as it is, striving only to preserve the status quo—can only lead to destruction, because the world, in gross and in detail, is irrevocably delivered up to the ruin of time unless human beings are determined to intervene, to alter, to create what is new” (2006, 192). Although some scholars have suggested that principles provide an orientation for political action, at least some of Arendt writings clearly state that principles stem from a beginning that is unconstrained by them.5 Politics does not preserve the world as it is and, insofar as it prolongs the world, it does so by means of renewing it. Action interrupts the flow of time by severing the future from the past.It is of course no coincidence that in her reflections on new beginnings both in On Revolution and in “The Crisis of Education,” Arendt makes the same reference as Derrida in his reflections on Marx's views on revolution: Hamlet's famous cry that “the time is out of joint.” The difference is that the ghost makes no appearance in Arendt's texts, and insofar as anything like a ghost is present in them (the absolutes, the old beginning), they are the effect of either tradition or fear, not an essential part of revolutionary action, as she sees it. The disjointedness of time is not in itself a problem for Arendt, because human beings have a capacity to disjoint time—a capacity to begin. And although it brings with itself the fear of the unprecedented, the capacity to begin needs nothing prior or above it to institute a new political community. For Derrida, as we will see, this interruption is more complicated, because we cannot break with the past without relying on it to some degree, thus producing ghosts. Bonnie Honig has examined this contrast in terms of the tension between performative and constative utterances—the “we hold” and the “these truths to be self-evident” moments in the American Constitution. She claims that Arendt “insists that the aporia, the gap that marks all performatives, can and should be held open. She understands that there is often a felt human need to fill this gap but she does not see it as a systemic, conceptual, or linguistic need” (Honig 1991, 105). For Derrida, by contrast, “the We hold . . . is capable of anchoring itself not because of its powerful purity as a performative, but because it is in fact both a constative and a performative” (Honig 1991, 105). I address the temporal dimension of this ambiguity in the next section.We may wonder why Arendt did not turn to Marx, or to any revolutionary experience inspired by him, in her analysis of revolution. The answer is likely that Arendt saw Marx as a continuator of a philosophical tradition that displaces political action by subordinating it to universal laws—in his case, the laws of life. In her essay “The Social Question” in On Revolution, Arendt criticizes what she sees as the fatal mistake that led to the degeneration of the French Revolution into terror: the focus above all on social concerns, such as the satisfaction of needs and the alleviation of suffering, as opposed to the focus on creating a properly political space for free public action and speech. Given Arendt's critique of Marx and Marxism in The Human Condition for subordinating political action to labor, it is likely that she did not see him as developing a properly political conception of revolutionary action, as she understands it. Moreover, as Margaret Canovan (1992) has shown, Arendt was concerned from early on with totalitarian elements in Marx's thought. As a result, she turns to the example of the American revolutionaries and their reactivation of the Roman conception of foundation as a new beginning. As usual, Arendt is more interested in less philosophically inclined thinkers and actors—those whose ideas are grounded on public engagements rather than on conceptual speculation or logical reasoning. Marx, for Arendt, is too immersed in the philosophical tradition to recognize the true nature of political action, which that tradition has systematically concealed.Derrida, like Arendt, is interested in the temporality of revolutionary action, in the disjointedness involved in it, but unlike Arendt, he sees Marx as a valuable and even unavoidable resource for thinking about it. The reason is that Marx acknowledges that this disjointedness necessarily involves ghosts—an aspect of Hamlet that Arendt, as we have seen, leaves aside. Marx, Derrida claims, “does not like ghosts any more than his adversaries do. He does not want to believe in them. But he thinks of nothing else” (2006, 57). This double logic of not wanting to believe in ghosts, yet obsessively thinking about them, is, as we now see, essential to political action. Following Marx's hesitation toward ghosts is therefore a way to understand the necessary hesitations of political action. The hesitation is a result of an insoluble problem involved in the temporality of political action, which cannot be oriented toward the future without borrowing from the past that it supposedly wants to overcome. The past thus becomes a nonpresent presence that haunts political action. The political challenge, for Derrida, consists in letting oneself be haunted by the past without renouncing the need for the new and unprecedented. In a word: Political actors must learn to live with ghosts.Before turning to Specters of Marx, let us briefly consider Derrida's conception of time, which frames his reading of Marx. In his seminal text “Ousia and Gramme,” Derrida challenges Heidegger's attempt to move beyond what he calls the “vulgar” concept of time, which is based (according to Heidegger) on the privilege of the present. While, following Heidegger, metaphysics has always considered time as derived from a presence that is in itself atemporal, Derrida claims that the meaning of presence, and thus of the present, the “now,” has always been ambivalent—which is why the distinction between the “vulgar” and the authentic concept of time does not hold. Reading Aristotle in a way that challenges Heidegger's interpretation, Derrida shows that the very concept of “presence” or “now” involves two contradictory meanings. On the one hand, the “now” must be one and indivisible, for it cannot coexist with another “now”: “Not to be able to coexist with an other (the same as itself), with an other now, is not a predicate of the now, but its essence as presence” (1982, 55). On the other hand, time implies the coexistences of several nows in the passage of one now to the next: “The impossible—the coexistence of two nows—appears only in a synthesis . . . let us say in a certain complicity or coimplication maintaining together several current nows which are said to be the one past and the other future” (1982, 55). Time, then, involves a contradiction in the very meaning of presence: It must exclude all other presences, and it must coexist with other presences.Bracketing the difficult conceptual problems involved in the notion of time, the important point to keep in mind is that the present, in order to be present (and not past or future), must at once include and exclude another present. If presence did not coexist with other presences, there would be no time, and therefore no presence to begin with. At the same time, however, the coexistence of presence with another presence implies that presence is not fully itself, for it is the essence of presence to be one and indivisible. This is why the very concept of presence, of “now,” involves an impossibility: “The now is (in the present indicative) the impossibility of coexisting with itself: with itself, that is, with an other self, an other now, an other same, a double.” The “now,” in other words, is always “out of joint”: In order to be, it must be what it is not. And this is not, according to Derrida, because of some flawed or “vulgar” conception of time. On the contrary, it is the very concept of time that requires the coexistence of contradictory meanings: The now must be itself and not itself (indivisible and divisible) in order to be a now at all. This is why it must coexist with a double, which is not radically other but rather itself as a double.The reference to a “double” in Derrida's analysis of the now already points to the spectral logic that operates in Marx's understanding of revolution, as Derrida interprets it. Derrida notes that for Marx, revolutions are haunted by ghosts, and specifically by ghosts from the past. In The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx famously claims that “men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please in circumstances they choose for themselves; rather they make it in present circumstances, given and inherited