The Following Paper Is to Be Presented to ISUD Eighthworld Congress

Paradoxical Justice in the Horizon of Post-modernity：on Derrida and Nancy

Hu Jihua

Abstract:

This essay is about Derrida’s and Nancy’s views on the justice in the post-modernity. Maybe it is much bold for us to talk about of a justice in post-modernity. It is only in the post-modern horizon that the justice, which is always in the most of cultural traditions postulated as the ultimate significance for human beings, can be exposed itself to the aporias. The aporias is, according to Derrida and Nancy, necessarily constituted by and constitutes itself as the non-conditionality of possibility for the universal value in relation to the singular ethos.

Then it is inevitable that we have to encounter the abyss of paradoxes even while seeking for the non-deconstructible justice. The justice is not possible to be deconstructed and in turn the non-deconstructible is precisely the absolute condition of the deconstructible, as Derrida suggested. But the aporias are the same as before. In order to imaginatively mollify the disconcerting state of anxiety about the multi-morality and transculturality, put differently, we have to push forward the cultural logic of post-modernity dominated by the heterogeneity so extremely that the sense of world is exposed itself. The exposure is, according to Derrida, the justice without justice and, according to Nancy, the entanglement of the myth and nihilism that refers to the conflict between the plural and the singular, between the absolute and the relative.

In accordance with what is named as “the undeconstructible justice” by Derrida in general, the urgent leap of logic situation and the apparent escape from the stricture of metaphysics and its closure of the substantialized morality will turn back inevitably into the same trap that he takes pain to flee. Consequently deconstruction has no way to break with the powerful double bind. Derrida provides a tentative solution to this dilemma, not through persistence upon a negative logic, but through a perdurable affirmation of the otherness, namely an absolute responsibility or a non-conditioned hospitality for the Other. This is a kind of universal value which is needed to escape from relativist, cynic, and even nihilist chaotic mentality in post-modernity.

Of many post-moderns who try to transcend or overcome the exhaustion of sense, Nancy is the most radical one. But he vibrates between the myth and the nihilism and hesitates to stand his ground on one of the extremes, so that the ultimate meaning would be left in the suspense because the only sense of world consists in its senselessness, in his own words, we are in the middle of nihilism. Precisely, nothing is nothing nihilist! Needless to say, the only myth in post-modernity is nihilism! The way of speaking about sense and truth should be that of doing with and dealing with the nihilism. At the same time it is a way of speaking about community and politics. In the context of discourses on the inoperative community and global de-politicization, all questions of sense are unexceptionally in relationship to the deconstruction of Christianity, which is directed toward his own goal of philosophizing.

But Nancy believes that if we do not clear out the historically sedimentary sentimentality of Christianity, today it is impossible to talk about a community of fraternity or a politics of love since love is shattered, and fraternity is without generosity. Only with the shattered love or broken heart can we in another way say the Law of Love, which is only a law to extent that there is precisely neither love nor law, or there is no closure of the law, or that in love we find the achievement of law. Only in the sense can we speak of a politics without politics and a community without community. Of the minimal morality the culture of heart with a broken heart is the most principal one, which means we are meaning because everyone in all over the world is both plural and singular.

As a conclusion, it might well be said that there are still possibilities of establishing an ultimate sense of world through exhaustion of possible paradoxes in post-modernity as long as we give up the obsession with petrifying the one extreme of sense of world. More importantly, all questions concerned with justice will be put in the view of combination of the plural and the singular, myth and nihilism.

In one word, Justice consists in the remains or fragments left by the collapse of the absolute and only value.

The objective of this essay is to provide a philosophical foundation for discussion about justice in the so-called postmodern mêlêe in which multiple values conflict with each other. In Marx Weber’s term, this situation may be designated as ‘the war of gods’. Naturally it has raised some questions in regard to values on which each individual depends and determine his meaning of life. For, among the diverse values that accumulated through historical development, justice is one of the most important, if you wish, ultimate values. What is more, justice is certainly central to many postmodern figures such as Rawls, Habermas, Derrida, Nancy, and we can mention few, even though a profound nihilism rises to the power and even becomes an absolutely prevailing trend of intellectual life today.

But as far justice is concerned, the problem tends to be more dramatic than before. Is possible justice in the universal abandonment of every super-sensual meaning and after the death of God was announced by Nietzsche? Is possible justice in the context of globalization and its acceleration since 80s of last century if the fantastic presence of the global village expresses the very paradoxical dimension that every one desired to be equal but acquired the inequality? And philosophically, is there an essential connection between the possibility of justice and deconstruction? That is to say, is possible justice in the orbit of deconstruction if it exists? As every one well known, deconstruction, which is eternally related to Jacques Derrida and the intellectual atmosphere of his time, is generally debased as an immoral, relativist, and even nihilist thinking. And such a prejudice is so wide-spread and over-controlling that one can not but cast doubt on the ultimate values including justice and even make a resolute answer to the question of whether it is possible to do justice in the deconstruction.

Our analysis will focus on Derrida’s and Nancy’s views on the justice and related themesin order to pursue the possibility of justicein the post-modernity. Maybe it is much bold for us to talk about of a justice in post-modernity.It is only in the post-modern horizon that the justice, which is always in the most of cultural traditions postulated as the ultimate significance for human beings, can be exposed itself to the aporias. The aporias is, according to Derrida and Nancy, necessarily constituted by and constitutes itself as the non-conditionality of possibility for the universal value in relation to the singular ethos.

I. Justice in and as Aporias

The term ‘aporia’ originates from Greek ‘αποια’. Its literal meaning is that “there is no path, no exit, and no place.” Philosophically denoting a logical contradiction or paradox, aporia is used by Derrida to designate what he usually calls the ‘blind spots’ of any metaphysical argumentations. Take justice as an example and we can easily touch on this case. The aporia in the point is that while everything seems to be unable to resist deconstruction, justice can not be deconstructed and survive as the condition of deconstruction. Briefly, the un-deconstructible is an absolute condition of deconstruction.

Note the reference here to the analysis of the institutional, political and ethical structure in relation to the double bind (the capability to subvert and the constriction to resist), which is the key to understanding deconstruction. What distinguishes a deconstructive analysis is that it always begins from an encounter the aporias that must be overlooked in order to make justice’s presence seem undeconstructible. But if such an encounter is ‘deconstructive’, this does not preclude from being philosophical, political, legislative, and ethical at the same time. Indeed, if not only metaphysics but also politics or ethics draws on the necessity of undeconstructible presence or presence without difference, then any deconstructive analysis of that foundations and its logic could never be anything less than a philosophical and a political analysis as well(Niall Lucy, 2004:2).

The undeconstructible presence of justice experienced by Derrida has a complicated connection with the prophetic tradition through which the wires of deconstruction goes. If it is right to say that the prophetic tradition embodies the passion for the impossible that is the Messiah to come, then Derrida’s experience of justice is also the passion for the impossible. Therefore there is no doubt an alliance between the prophetic tradition and the justice in deconstruction. Through this implied and enigmatic alliance, John D. Caputo is tempted to “trace out a new alliance between the God of Derrida, ‘my God’, with……the God of pathos, the pathos of God; to make allies out of the madness of the instant of the pure gift, which tears up the circle of return and appropriation, and divine madness.” Even though this mystery of alliance is beyond the reach of cognition that is founded upon the so called rationality, it is not difficult for us to experience “something that has to do with suffering and justice” (Caputo, 1997: 337). Of course this is something that impassions, that is, something that stimulates Messianism without Messiah. According to the divine covenant (con-veniens), what comes together in the alliance is the viens of a justice to come just as the democracy to come declared by Derrida. Clearly, justice as the undeconstructible, whose roots are in the memory of the distant divinity and up to now disappearing in the worldly circumstances, is restored by Derrida into the Judo-Greek-Christian context and related to the faith (in Messiah) and religion (without religion).

Yahweh says to Amos, he does not want your festivals and sacrifices, your loud songs and solemn assemblies, he wants justice to flow like water over the land (Amos 5:18). Likewise, Derrida seems to tell us, he does not care about the priestly hierarchy, about the orthodox or pagan Christianity, about the conventional or reformed Judaism, but just about justice. And like Yahweh, Derrida seems to say, but about a religion without religion or prior to religion, a religion the only thing people believe in religiously is justice, where their passion is to let justice flow like water. Combined with the prophetic tradition and founded upon the alliance, justice is nearly equal to faith that is a passion for the impossible or for something to come, whether it is Messiah to come or democracy to come.

Then it is inevitable that we have to encounter the abyss of paradoxes even while seeking for the undeconstructible justice. The justice is not possible to be deconstructed and in turn the non-deconstructible is precisely the absolute condition of the deconstructible, as Derrida suggested. But the aporias are the same as before. In order to imaginatively mollify the disconcerting state of anxiety about the multi-morality and transculturality, put differently, we have to push forward the cultural logic of post-modernity dominated by the heterogeneity so extremely that the sense of world is exposed itself.

The discussion about justice exposed by Derrida in this way can only be apprehended through its combinations with the tradition of Messianism which, as mentioned above, still casts light on the political or ethical considerations today. Especially for Derrida, all of the political and ethical structures must and can be based on an authority. Citing Pascal and Montaigne, Derrida asserted that the foundation of this authority is profoundly mythical, that is, without foundation. Derrida said,

Since the origin of authority, the foundation or ground, the position of law can’t by definition rest on anything but themselves, they are themselves a violence without ground (Derrida, 1992: 14).

But it is important to distinguish justice from law. The essential difference between law and justice takes its root in a structure which, as Derrida was describing, is paradoxical.

The structure…...here is a structure in which law (droit) is essentially deconstructible…..The fact that law is deconstructible is not bad news. We may even see in this a stroke of luck for politics, for all historical progress. But the paradox……is the following: it is this deconstructible structure of law (droit), or if you prefer of justice as droit, that also insures the possibility of deconstruction. Justice itself, if such a thing exists, outside or beyond law, is not deconstructible. No more than deconstruction itself, if such a thing exists. Deconstruction is justice (ibid., 14-15).

Following this paradoxical logic, Derrida draws some conclusions from the fact that law is calculable and deconstructible while justice is incalculable and undeconstructible. First, the deconstructibility of law (droit), of legality or legitimation (for example) makes deconstruction possible. Second, the undeconstructibility of justice also makes deconstruction possible, indeed is inseparable from it. Third, the result is that deconstruction takes place in the interval that separates the undeconstructibilty of justice from the deconstructibility of droit (authority, legitimacy and so forth). Doubtless justice is an essentially deconstructive attitude to law and it is only possible as an experience of the impossible where there is justice. Derrida’s undeniable formulation is that

There is no justice without this experience, however impossible it may be, of aporia. Justice is an experience of the impossible (ibid., 16).

If politics or ethics, as Max Weber asserted, means that “man would not have attained the possible unless and again he had reached out for the impossible” (Weber, 1948:128), then we have the right to say that our pursuit after justice is also based on the passion for the impossible.

Accordingly, as a critical position to law, justice is the relationship to the other, if you will, to the absolutely other, which cannot be determined or simply meditated by the construct of law, but which reaches out to the other through an aporia, that is, an un-decidedness or the failure of law (Davies, 2001: 232). Deconstruction and justice have to intervene in the law, so both are impossible, but absolutely necessary.

II. Justice in and as Mondialization

Like Derrida, who tried to solicit the metaphysical foundation of the political and ethic on which the deconstructible law rests, Nancy’s central concern is with the justice which is impossible, but impossibly be deconstructed. Justice is exposed as the sense of the world. Following the onto-theo-logical line delineated by Martin Heidegger, Nancy showed that the exposure of the sense of the world is an ecstasy or entrancement. “Being, therefore, does not deprive the essence of essence: essence simply does not take place. Being entrances the essence” (Nancy, 1997:31, original italics).

The exposure is, according to Derrida, the justice without justice and, according to Nancy, the entanglement of the myth and nihilism that refers to the conflict between the plural and the singular, between the absolute and the relative. If Derrida’s project of justice is to point toward the basic structure of politics and ethics, then Nancy’s considerations on justice is more concerned with contemporary disastrous situations in which the senseless becomes the only sense of the world and the fragment the only symbol of utopian totality. For Nancy, what we today encounter is beyond the crisis of sense: “all sense has been abandoned” (1997: 2). He has suggested further that we experience the disaster within the contemporary situations of art:

Fragment: no longer the piece fallen from a broken set, but the explosive splintering of that which is neither immanent nor transcendent. The in-finite explosion of the finite. Not the piece that has fallen, and even less the piece that fallen into decay, but the piece that has befallen, that is to say, that has come by devolution. Devolution is attribution, division, destination, passing of contracts, transfer by unrolling (devolvere), unfolding, and disintrication. World, fragment: being devolved (ibid., 132, original italics)

It seems to us that the fragmentations are not merely a kind of style of writings that can be traced back to early German Romanticism at the initial of 19th century and handed down to the present, but also an outstanding representation of today real world in which all sense is exhausted or abandoned. Of many post-moderns who try to transcend or overcome the exhaustion of sense, Nancy is the most radical one. But he vibrates between the myth and the nihilism and hesitates to stand his ground on one of the extremes, so that the ultimate meaning would be left in the suspense because the only sense of world consists in its senselessness, in his own words, we are in the middle of nihilism. In fact, Nancy provided a somewhat oblique answer to the question of value, such as the political value, the ethic value, the coexistential value, and so on. The term “value” is changeable for “sense” and both are related to the world we live today. Nancy gradually define sense more especially as that----infinitesimal and always deferred, or in Derrida’s term, entered difference----dimension of value that makes up the mere border between absolute and relative value. The former is posited as what Nancy calls “the mythical discourse” while the latter is posited as what Nancy calls “the nihilist discourse”. But essentially a relative value always ends up amounting to an absolute absence of value, namely, abandoning all sense so categorically that it will transform nihilism into myth. The absolute ascendancy of an absence of value is conceived of as the evidence that there exists a profound nihilism.