Impossible Objects

Simon Critchley, Carl Cederström, Todd Kesselman

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745653211, 9780745653204
• eBook ISBN: 9780745655109
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Impossible objects are those about which the philosopher, narrowly conceived, can hardly speak: poetry, film, music, humor. Such "objects" do not rely on philosophy for interpretation and understanding; they are already independent practices and sites of sensuous meaning production. As Elvis Costello has said, "writing about music is like dancing about architecture." We don't need literary theory in order to be riveted by the poem, nor a critic's analysis to enjoy a film. How then can philosophy speak about anything outside of itself, namely all of those things which actually matter to us in this world?

In Impossible Objects, Simon Critchley - one of the most influential and insightful philosophers writing today - extends his philosophical investigation into non-philosophical territories, including discussions on tragedy, poetry, humor, and music. In a series of engaging and enlightening conversations, Critchley reflects on his early work on the ethics of deconstruction; the recurring themes of mortality and nihilism; his defense of neo-anarchism; and his recent investigation into secular faith, or "a faith of the faithless". Essential reading for artists, academics, and general readers alike, this book explores the relationship between the philosophical world and those complex and fascinating "impossible objects" which give life meaning.

1 Early Bedfellows

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Levinas, Derrida, and the Ethics of Deconstruction

Joshua Mullan and David Hannigan

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA, APRIL 2000

This is one of the earliest recorded interviews with Simon Critchley. David Hannigan and Joshua Mullan were two PhD students at the University of Sydney whom Critchley had met on a couple of occasions, and were “serious about having a philosophical conversation.” The interview took place in April of 2000, while Critchley was a visiting scholar in the philosophy department at the University of Sydney. The setting was idyllic.

It took place in the office of Moira Gatens, which I was borrowing for the semester, in the Old Building, which is this beautiful mid-nineteenth century imitation of an Oxford college, on a hill just to the north of Sydney, but on the edge of the city. There was this Jacaranda tree in the quad outside, and these birds would screech and hop around out there.

The discussion focuses on Critchley’s first published book, The Ethics of Deconstruction, which had been based upon his PhD thesis. The great achievement of that book was that it had, for the first time, opened up an ethical reading of Derrida and deconstruction through the work of Levinas. This ethical reading was a significant contribution in that Derrida was routinely dismissed as an empty formalist, or perhaps even a nihilist. In this interview, we find a detailed account of the shaping of these early thoughts. “It is a very accurate overview of what I was thinking in the context of the Ethics of Deconstruction.” But it also extends the original arguments, relating them to key themes of the Frankfurt School, especially the work of Jürgen Habermas. A few years prior to the interview, in 1997, Critchley had spent a full year in Frankfurt, debating and working with Axel Honneth. “You can see the extent of the infl uence the Frankfurt School debates had on me at the time.” Honneth’s inheritance of Habermas is explored here as a means to bridge the gap between ethical subjectivity and political formalism – a line of thought that also appeared in Critchley’s Continental Philosophy, but later receded within his work. “I recall that the conversation was very intense and focused, but I couldn’t even do this interview now. The material isn’t present in my mind any longer. It’s interesting to see how the interview is a kind of slice of time, what one was thinking about at a certain period, and the way that the themes accumulate and pile up.” The interview is here published for the first time, as it had not been carried out with the intention of publication. “I am very pleased that something is finally happening with it. David and Josh spoke with me for their own curiosity, but they were extremely professional, and the result is a good portrait of some of my early obsessions.”

DAVID HANNIGAN: Given that much of your work to date has revolved around the writings of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, can you please tell us when, and in what circumstances, you first encountered their work?

SIMON CRITCHLEY: I purchased a copy of Totality and Infinity at a book sale in 1983, which cost almost nothing. I remember reading the preface on the train from Colchester to London and thinking, “This is amazing.” I knew Buber’s work at the time and had been very persuaded by I and Thou and so I fitted Levinas into the context of Buber and the Jewish tradition straight away. Derrida, I can remember to this day, I read in a launderette in the University of Essex. Again that was in 1983. We were reading “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences” in the Communist Society reading group at Essex University, which seems faintly comical now. We were very serious. I read that essay and hadn’t really understood it. Then I read the opening page of “Violence and Metaphysics” on Levinas and thought that the first paragraph, where Derrida is talking about the question, the community of the question and all that, was simply extraordinary. Derrida was the avant-garde in continental philosophy and therefore I wanted to understand it. Also, the assumption we shared, without knowing much, was that Derrida was somebody on the left; we read his work in the Communist Society reading group after reading Althusser and Foucault and therefore his works would have had obvious ethical and political relevance. So that’s how I came to them.

JOSHUA MULLAN: And it was out of that context that your initial thesis emerged?

SC: Yes. The problem for me in Derrida’s work was, what prevents this form of reading from simply being a textual formalism without any relevance to contextual questions of ethics, culture, society, politics? I tried to show that the basic operation in his thought is ethical. That deconstruction as a practice of reading is ethical, which was also a claim being advanced by Hillis Miller at about the same time. But I was always a long, long way from the preoccupations of the Yale School. I wanted to make the more substantive claim that there was a phenomenology of moral experience – well, almost – in Derrida’s work, provided you read it in relationship to Levinas. So the idea was that we can save Derrida’s work from what looked like an empty formalism, which was the Hegelian critique of Derrida by people like Jay Bernstein and Gillian Rose at that time in the UK. And we can do this by showing that there was an ethical motivation to his work, with possible political consequences. So that was the specific agenda for writing The Ethics of Deconstruction and that was there from very early on. And it is interesting how differently Derrida’s work appears now than it did in the 1980s.

DH: More recently, you have stated that you are more doubtful about the persuasive force of Levinasian ethics. Why?

SC: In many ways the context changed. In the late 1980s, if you were interested in Levinas, you felt that you were part of a tiny clique who read these texts with an almost religious fervor. It seemed as if there were maybe ten people in the world who really took Levinas seriously. The way in which Levinas came into focus for many people was through the success of Derrida’s work. And people like me and my supervisor Robert Bernasconi and others were trying to present Levinas’s thought and defend it to the hilt against ignorance of his work. I think the key experience here was the Heidegger affair in 1986–7 and the Paul de Man affair in 1987. The claim was that deconstruction in its Heideggerian or De Manian forms was morally vacuous. In that context, and for people who were accused of that, Levinas became a very useful way of showing that there was a post-Heideggerian ethics or a deconstructive ethics. So that was the context, and what changed for me was that the consensus changed. Levinas became available, even trendy, as a philosopher and the critical, philosophical task became one of trying to think through what could and could not be philosophically defended in Levinas’s work.

JM: What do you think about the increased interest in Levinasian ethics?

SC: It both delights and worries me. I am pleased that people are reading Levinas and not merely in philosophy but in law and in international relations, literary theory, aesthetic theory, all over the place. But there is a sense in which there is a piety that has grown up around Levinas. People are using Levinas as an intellectual crutch to stop them from doing a lot more difficult thinking. That worries me; I’m enough of a Habermasian, finally enough of a Kantian, to realize that ethics and normativity require a lot more rational discursive work than just appealing to some notion of experience of the other as immediately given. Even more worrying for me is that the category of ethics in Levinas is dependent on the category of the religious. And the way in which Levinas is picked up, particularly in the United States, as an ethical thinker is also fundamentally as a religious thinker, even in people as sophisticated as John Caputo. I think in a sense they are right that the face-to-face relation opens onto the relation of the divine in Levinas. However, as an atheist I find that unintelligible. So I want to defend Levinas in terms that show that his thought is not reliant on some type of implicit religiosity.

JM: Taking account of how your views have been modified in relation to Levinasian ethics, what do you consider to be the most significant difference between the work of Derrida and Levinas today?

SC: Well, Derrida famously says, in a 1986 discussion in Paris, that there are no differences between himself and Levinas. So in that sense there are no differences and one way of looking at Derrida’s work since 1986 is in terms of making good on that statement. Also, one fairly conventional but powerful way of looking at Derrida’s work is that it moves between two poles of attraction. One pole of attraction is Heideggerian and the other pole is Levinasian. I’m thinking about Levinas’s skepticism concerning the place where Heidegger’s movement of thought ends up – particularly with regard to ethics and politics. So, when Derrida says something like “deconstruction is justice and justice is undeconstructible” and that what justice means really is the relation to the other, then it seems to be fairly clear where he is speaking from – and that cannot be from a Heideggerian place. Heidegger would never have said anything like that. But the way Derrida gets to that statement is often still by employing Heideggerian methods or habits of thought. Derrida will still make Heideggerian moves in the argumentation but then the conclusion of the argument has a much more Levinasian feel. On the other hand, there are significant differences between Derrida and Levinas. As I see it, there are a number of problem areas in Levinas’s work, specifically the question of “monotheism,” the question of “sexual difference,” the question of the “family” and the question of “Israel.” In many ways the name “Israel” is the culmination of all those many questions. “Israel” is the name for a monotheistic political community based upon a certain conception of the family, and a very traditional understanding of sexual difference. In the face of those worries about Levinas, Derrida can be thought of as being simply critical of Levinas. However, the way he makes that critique in Adieu: Emmanuel Levinas, the 1997 text, is that he will say that the form of the ethical relation is right but the political content in Levinas’s work is misguided. Of course, he doesn’t say it as brutally as that but that’s clearly what is on his mind. For me that is the significant difference between them.

DH: How do you account for what you’ve referred to as Levinas’s political blind spot in relation to Israel? How does this relate to his views on Marxism?

SC: For Levinas, Marxism is the absorption of the ethical into the socioeconomic, and so it is the disappearance of the face-to-face relation and the privileging of relations of solidarity and anonymous sociality – what he calls, in Time and the Other, “socialism.” And he would want to criticize Marxism from that point of view. In Levinas’s own theory the name of the blind spot is “Israel.” Levinas is absolutely clear from very early on that the form of the ethical relation has to be concretized and contextualized in politics, in a workable conception of justice. This is the core of his disagreement with Buber. And the name for the community that would instantiate justice informed by the ethical relation has to be “Israel” for Levinas. “Israel” means the ethically informed community of the people of the Bible. The basic message of the Bible for Levinas is the ethical relation; infinite responsibility, which leads to a certain conception of justice. And that’s a conception of justice that was binding on Israel, Jewish and non-Jewish. So far, so good. “Israel” is the name for an idea of justice, a utopian idea of justice, which it was before 1948. Israel as an actually existing state leads Levinas into all sorts of problems, I think. He cannot criticize Israel because Israel has to be the ethical instantiation of justice in the world. Therefore when Israel commits acts of political murder, even by proxy (as it did in Sabra and Chatila in 1982, and as it has done against the Palestinians systematically since the establishment of the state of Israel), Levinas cannot criticize Israel, he doesn’t have the resources for criticizing Israel. So the blind spot is structural in Levinas; it is a consequence of his movement of thought. Therefore to reveal that blind spot, to call it into question, is to call Levinas into question in a certain way.

DH: What is it that stops Derrida from having the same blind spot? Is it his ability to hesitate about political content?

SC: Not just that. To go back to what I was saying before, the accusation of formalism against Derrida, which people like me try to defend him against, is, in a sense, true. He is a formalist. There is an ethical formalism in Derrida and what is formal is a priori, it is universal, it is not context specific, so that Derrida can say that deconstruction is justice and, at all times and all places in the earth, there is this injustice which requires us to think of what justice means and to instantiate justice in the world. So there is a context-transcendent basis, in Habermasian terms, for political and social thought in Derrida. For Derrida, the question of politics becomes a question of a form of political action that would not be instantiated in some sort of organic notion of community or some existing notion of the state. The way that I have tried to think about this is to think of Derrida’s notion of “democracy to come” as an ethical criterion for politicization, a movement of politicization that would be consistently challenging any notion of the state apparatus, or any notion of the community. So deconstruction in that sense becomes a form of ethical aggravation within a social context. And it is inconceivable for me that Derrida would end up endorsing any particular name like “Israel” or the way that Heidegger endorses Hölderlin’s word Germanien. This leads Derrida into what he calls the “New International”: a new form of alliance that would not be a form of alliance, or would not be specific to any particular community. So his formalism leads to a form of “political internationalism.”

JM: On this point, you argued in the first edition of The Ethics of Deconstruction that there was an impasse of the political in Derrida’s work, and that deconstruction fails to offer a coherent account of the passage from ethical responsibility to the question of the political and critique. In the second edition, you state that, based upon Derrida’s work since 1992, you are more positive about the political possibilities of deconstruction. Do you remain as optimistic today?

SC: Yes I do. As other people seem to like Derrida less and become increasingly bored with him, I like him more and more. I think Derrida is simply the most intelligent philosopher that I have ever read or heard; his capacity to develop thinking, improvise thinking, assimilate concepts, and generate new ideas is absolutely extraordinary. I think he is exemplary as a philosopher. He’s a bit like Miles Davis in the 1960s. On the basis of a very simple theme, he manages to elaborate an enormously complex and interesting structure and no one else can do that. No one else for me comes close to him in terms of his intellectual brilliance. The problem is that he writes too much. The worry that I had in my first book was that there was no way of getting from ethics to politics in his work. He was content to raise the question of the “question of the question” as it were, the question of responsibility prior to questioning, but failed to ask the question of politics, of what justice is, i.e., what should be done in this particular context in this particular time? He appeared to be shy of concrete political questions. But that was before the “Force of Law,” Specters of Marx, Politics of Friendship, and a whole range of other texts. I think that in those texts he has gone an enormous way to answering some of those worries that I had.

DH: In terms of the ethical relationship to the other, the experience of the undecidable, and the legal and political decisions that are still required to be taken, could you clarify what you mean by the expression “the other’s decision in me”?

SC: The “other’s decision in me” is a phrase lifted from The Politics of Friendship. The question is very simple, namely that the traditional conception of the political in Carl Schmitt is the capacity to decide, and the fundamental decision is the decision of who is my friend and who is my enemy. Derrida’s claim in The Politics of Friendship is that this notion of the political presupposes a conception of the subject as an active, willful, masculine actor. So the traditional conception of the political presupposes a masculine social actor who can decide who is my friend, who is my enemy. What Derrida is trying to do is criticize that notion of the political through an ethical criterion. So the activity of politics becomes conditioned by a fundamental passivity that is unconditional, which as it were is there before me and despite me. Fundamentally, there is a powerlessness, an impotence, a lack of virility that defines the subject. The subject is defined, not by the capacity to decide, but by the other’s decision, which was already in me, in a way that traumatizes me. I want to link that notion in Derrida to the theme of the traumatized subject in Levinas and in psychoanalysis. To do so is to try to come up with a different picture of the subject and then to link that notion of the “other’s decision in me” to a conception of political action. So political action would be invention on the basis of the “other’s decision in me” – acts of invention or imagination where I create a norm, or I bring about a norm that is not necessarily foundationally deduced from a normative framework as it would be in Habermas. Here, the notion of invention or political imagination is rooted in some ethical criterion that leads me into making that decision.

JM: How might Derrida’s account of the “moment of madness” in the decision be understood in relation to your understanding Badiou’s Event and the psychoanalytical account of subjectivity that you offer?

SC: My interest in Badiou’s work is sort of a troublemaking interest because Badiou and Derrida have not been the best of friends in the past. Insofar as one can apply the friend/enemy distinction, they are political enemies. What is fascinating in Badiou is the way in which he gives us a theory of the event, and the way in which the subject assumes the event and acts on the basis of the event. My critique of Badiou is that the notion of politics still remains locked up in a heroic and arguably masculinist model. But I think that what Badiou can provide is, in a sense, a way out of the impasse of Derrida’s work in terms of the theory of the event.

DH: Recalling that Badiou is so dismissive of Levinas and the theological aspect in his work, I’m wondering about Derrida’s use of the term, the “messianic.” Given the word’s obvious religious associations, do you think it is a strategically useful notion to be used in relation to political decision-making, to “democracy to come,” to the “New International,” etc.?

SC: Maybe it isn’t the right word to use. I have tried to argue in an essay on Badiou that there’s a structural Judaism at work in thinkers like Levinas and Derrida. And what I mean by that is that the notion of the “messianic” is the idea of the subject being constituted in relationship to an event that overwhelms it. So the subject comes to itself, finds itself, in relationship to an event in which it is already inscribed – always...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Early Bedfellows
• 2 Keep Your Mind in Hell and Despair Not
• 3 The State is a Limitation on Human Existence
• 4 Infinitely Demanding Anarchism
• 5 Action in a World of Recuperation
• 6 Language and Murder
• 7 Confessions of a Punk Rocker
• 8 Art and Ethics
• 9 Tragedy and Modernity
• List of Works
• Index