Panel 1c: Continental Political Philosophy -- Friday, 17 October 2003, 1-3 p.m.
Chair: Christopher C. Robinson, Liberal Arts, Clarkson University
Discussant: Ed Wingenbach, Government, University of Redlands
Abstracts:
Peter Gratton, “Derrida, Grammatology, and Politics”
It is a common motif by commentators on Derrida’s texts to argue that his work was apolitical until the publication of Politics of Friendship in 1989, after which followed a number of supposedly more political texts: Specters of Marx, Adieu, Of Hospitality, etc. These texts, to use Geoffrey Bennington’s and Richard Beardsworth’s recent work as examples, mark only a move “toward” the political, toward the political, because Bennington, and others, seem loathe to admit that Derrida offers a politics as such, since any politics as traditionally received would be metaphysical through and through.
We will take Bennington’s claim at its word that “traditional political thinking believes it can determine decisions by writing the theory of their practice” by showing the way in which Derrida, in his early work, reads the co-implication of writing and politics. We will read Of Grammatology closely to show the way in this book about writing [l’ecriture] is also very much political, since, for Derrida, one is always implicated in the other. As such, this reading will counter the claims that Derrida’s early work does not include texts of “political philosophy.”
J. Henry Messinger, “The Self-Evident Foundation of Authority: Law, Sense, and
Substance”
"The [United States] Constitution was founded on the law of gravitation." -- Woodrow Wilson
Among the central problems of Derrida's "Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority'" is that law, in a direct analogy with a signature, does not have a foundation which precedes it in time. Law had a self-evident foundation which disappeared. That is why its foundation appears mystical. The force of law was that law was the substance of the world. Newton provided one relatively simple rule which applied equally and independently to every particle of matter in the universe and which by itself explained the motions of the planets and the comets, the fall of objects to the earth, and the tides. Newton's calling this a 'law' is a neologistic usage that radically changed the concept of law. After Newton, law was the self-evident foundation of the world, the actuality of what existed; in pre-modern terms, its substance. In his biography of Newton, Richard Westfall says, "In the beginning God created the laws of nature." Newton makes sense of the world and the pervasive skepticism of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, still a problem for Hobbes, is replaced, in Locke, with the common sense of a self-evident subject. When Newtonian principles no longer make sense of the world, this self-evidence disappears, leaving the force of law with, as Derrida puts it, only a mystical foundation. This represents a return to the orderless world of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century skepticism, and Derrida borrows his title from the period's leading skeptic, Montaigne.
Newton brings order to the universe and the order he brings is located in time, replacing an Aristotelian spatial order which had depended on the earth being in the center of the world. It is because Newton's order is in time that the mystery which appears when law is no longer self-evident appears as the absence of the temporal priority of law's foundation. It is also why the lack of temporal priority is a similar problem for the foundation of subjectivity or a signature. That 'gravity' is an occult quality, so that what is transformed into the apparently self-evident foundation is actually mystical only leaves the foundation of law that much more mysterious when the self-evidence disappears. It is the self-evidence of law as substance which supports understanding Patricia Williams when, speaking of the law, she says, "The Law. The law says, the law is. My life, my tissue, my membrane" (Alchemy of Race and Rights 1991, 208). It is because of the loss of this self-evidence that, three sentences later, she will say, "I notice suddenly that I am making no sense." If the knot of law, time, and subjectivity is to be unraveled, it will not be through an orientation based on time or space. These are no longer locations able to support direction. That citation, as deployed by Judith Butler, is plural and indeterminate in both time and direction is the source of its potential in tracing, if not unraveling, the threads of such a knot.
John Baltes, “Death, Natality, and Forebearance: A Heideggerian Analysis of Sein-zum-Tode”
Traditional political and philosophical paradigms have suffered under the weight of post-modern critiques and the inability to clarify common ground within the contemporary milieu. However, if attention is turned to the entities presupposed by our ethical and political theories, and if contestability can be seen as a strength rather than a weakness, a new landscape of possible foundations emerges. My paper attempts to re-interpret Martin Heidegger's Being and Time as an attempt to think through just such a contestable, weak ground for ethics and politics, concentrating on his analysis of being-towards-death. I suggest that in the place of an assertive, disengaged self who generates distance from its background (tradition, embodiment) and foreground (external nature, other subjects) in the name of accelerated mastery of them, Heidegger posits an entangled self, aware of its finitude, both in the sense of its mortality and its limitations as an agent.1 This awareness of finitude, rather than engendering a feeling of resignation or nihilism, generates possibilities for agency and natality by allowing individuation within the limitations imposed by finitude and facticity. Furthermore, I suggest an alternative superior to William Connolly's rendering of a neo-Nietzschean foundation, in that unlike Connolly, my neo-Heideggerian analysis nudges the self in the direction of specifically human concern, that is, toward forebearance and generosity towards others.