Abstract
In the previous chapter we examined Habermas’s attempt to overcome ethical parochialism and ensure agreement in judgments by grounding the validity of moral norms in terms of “what all could will.” I argued that moral norms should be conceived as constitutive of interests, rather than as contributing to their satisfaction. However, by rejecting Habermas’s principle of universalization (U), I may appear to be reinstating the thesis that we are “locked into what we happen to agree on” at a particular time and place.3 In this chapter we will examine an attempt to avoid these alternatives by distinguishing the inherent “deconstructibility” of laws from the “indeconstructibility” of justice.
You know the rules, now turn them into justice.
Aeschylus1
All is lost when empirical and therefore contingent conditions of the application of law are made conditions of the law itself.
Immanuel Kant2
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Notes
Aeschylus, The Oresteia, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 256.
Immanuel Kant, “On the Proverb: That May Be True in Theory, But Is of No Practical Use,” Perpetual Peace and Other Essays (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983), 62.
Cicero, De Re Publica and De Legibus, trans. Clinton Walker Keyes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 319.
Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” trans. Mary Quaintance, in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1992), 14.
In what follows I concentrate on theoretical concerns internal to the de-constructive enterprise. However, it should be noted that concerns of a more practical nature about the relation between deconstruction and ethics had arisen around this same time in the wake of the 1987 revelation that Paul de Man, a Yale deconstructionist and friend of Derrida, had published anti-Semitic articles in the early 1940s. Mark Lilia writes, “These might have been dismissed as youthful errors had Derrida and some of his American followers not then interpreted away the offending passages, denying their evident meaning, leaving the impression that deconstruction means you never have to say you’re sorry.” Lilia concludes, “It now appeared that deconstruction had, at the very least, a public relations problem, and that the questions of politics it so playfully left in suspension would now have to be answered.” Mark Lilia, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York: New York Review Books, 2001), 175.
Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, ed. Gerald Graff, trans. Samuel Weber (Evanston, II.: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 146.
Derrida, “Force of Law,” 14. Derrida’s allusion is to the final line of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (London: Routledge, 1974), §7.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 158.
Derrida, “Force of Law,” 15. See also Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 28
Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, trans. Giacomo Donis, ed. Giacomo Donis and David Webb (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 56. In what might be characterized as an interesting deconstructive “slippage,” there seems to be a lack of agreement among Derrida’s English translators as to how this term is to be spelled. Mary Quaintance (“Force of Law”) and Peggy Kamuf (Specters of Marx) evidently prefer “undeconstructible,” whereas Giacomo Donis (A Taste for the Secret) opts for “indeconstructible.” For what it matters, I happen to favor the latter, since it corresponds better with the English “indestructible.”
Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981)
Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), ix.
Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge; The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” trans. Samuel Weber, in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 47.
James K.A. Smith, “Re-Kanting Postmodernism?: Derrida’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, “Faith and Philosophy 17 (October 2000), 566.
John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 47.
Simon Glendinning, On Being With Others: Heidegger — Derrida — Wittgenstein (London: Routledge, 1998), 100. Crispin Wright interprets Wittgenstein along similar lines, arguing that “it might be preferable, in describing one’s most basic rule-governed responses, to think of them as informed not by an intuition (of the requirements of the rule) but [by] a kind of decision.”
Crispin Wright, “Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations and the central project of theoretical linguistics,” in Reflections on Chomsky, ed. Alexander George (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 240.
Derrida, Limited Inc, 8. As John Caputo puts it in the process of developing Derrida’s line of thought, “the effects of which ‘iterability,’ the code of repeatability, is capable cannot in principle be contained, programmed, or predicted.” John D. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 101.
See, e.g., Drucilla Cornell, “The Violence of the Masquerade: Law Dressed Up as Justice,” in Working Through Derrida, ed. Gary B. Madison (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 77–93.
Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, 2d ed. (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1999), 275.
Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit (New York: Routledge, 1992), 157. Cornell’s use of the phrase “metalanguage” is, however, misleading. Habermas’s proposal is grounded transcendentally, but it does not invoke a new language.
Samuel C. Wheeler, III, Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 215.
See Thomas McCarthy, Ideals and Illusions: On Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Contemporary Critical Theory (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991), 97–119.
Nancy Fraser, “The French Derrideans: Politicizing Deconstruction or Deconstructing the Political?” Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989)
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© 2005 Richard Amesbury
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Amesbury, R. (2005). Norms, Interpretation, and Decision-Making: Derrida on Justice. In: Morality and Social Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230507951_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230507951_3
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