Abstract
The characterisation of Derrida’s politics as a seeking for the “lesser violence” has become an almost paradigmatic interpretation. Yet the phrase la moindre violence appears only in the early essay “Violence and Metaphysics” and its meaning is not as straightforward as might initially seem. I will argue that it is a mistake to take this expression to summarise the political import of this essay let alone of deconstruction more generally. What Derrida repeatedly concerns himself on that occasion is not “the lesser violence” but “worse violence” and “the worst violence,” terms that appears several times. This will be seen to be as a prefiguring of how, from the early 1980s on, following engagements with Plato and Lyotard, Derrida repeatedly names and elaborates “the worst” as that which we should seek to avoid. In order to uncover the politics of deconstruction, I will examine what Derrida has to say about “the worst” as well as what is said in the secondary literature, for it is also a term around which a number of unfortunate misinterpretations have arisen. In conclusion, it will be remarked that with the late coinage of the term aimance Derrida makes clear his close proximity to the ethics of Levinas and his affirmation of an aspiration to nonviolence in the relationship with the other.
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Notes
Derrida (2009, p. 291). This comes in a discussion of "the case of the great elephant autopsied, inspected, dissected under the gaze of Louis XIV during the ceremony or lesson of anatomy in 1681" Ibid., 277. The putative relationship between the two references is rather perplexing, as the latter is of quite a different order to the rather abstract and sustained discussion in "Violence and Metaphysics." Indeed, that it feels perhaps a little forced makes one suspect that Derrida was rather keen to find an occasion on which to subtly distance himself from Beardsworth’s interpretation.
Derrida (1978, p. 83).
Ibid., 85.
Levinas (1969, pp. 80, 102–104, 292–293).
Levinas (2001, pp. 46–51).
Ibid., 48.
Levinas (1969, p. 74).
Derrida (1978, p. 112).
Ibid., 113.
Ibid., 117.
Ibid., 99.
Ibid., 117.
Ibid., 257.
Derrida (1978, p. 117).
Ibid., 148. From the closing pages we also have: "the necessity to avoid the worst violence, which threatens when one silently delivers oneself into the hands of the other in the night." Ibid., 152.
Ibid., 118.
Ibid., 128–9.
Ibid., 130.
Ibid., 147.
Beardsworth (1996, pp. xiv, 12, 20, 24).
Ibid., xiv. He also speaks of deconstruction being guided by a desire for "the invention of a future which is as complex as possible" xii.
Ibid., 46.
Ibid., 61.
Ibid.
Beardsworth (1996, p. 69).
Derrida (2005, p. 145).
Derrida (2002b, p. 31).
Derrida (2004, p. 53).
Ibid., 76.
Ibid., 99.
Ibid., 83.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Naas (2009).
Jacques Derrida(1990, 85).
Hägglund (2008, p. 83).
For a useful summary I direct readers to Derrida’s response to a question from Beardsworth in the interview, “Nietzsche and the Machine," which took place in 1993. Derrida (2002b, pp. 230–234). Some interesting and insightful statements concerning the decision can be found in (an obviously non-exhaustive selection): Derrida (1988, p. 116, 1993d, pp. 15, 17, 1995, pp. 53–81, 1999, pp. 116, 199–200, 1996, pp. 84, 86, 1997, pp. 16, 69, 2000, p. 16, 2001b, p. 56, 2002a, p. 255, 2002b, p. 236, 2002c, pp. 31, 229–235, 2003, p. 132, 2004, p. 53, 2005, pp. 145, 152).
Derrida (2002c, p. 235).
Mercier makes an important criticism of Hägglund along these lines when he argues that deconstruction already criticises the idea of, as he calls it, "a critical scene" in which a subject engages in a practice of choosing: "responsibility is never pure, not because it must always ‘discriminate', and do so violently, but mainly because responsibility is always preinterrupted by ‘the pre-originary invention of the other'". Mercier (2020, pp. 1–25).
In arguing that le pire has a distinctive philosophical status as a term for Derrida, we need to be aware of issues of translation. In particular, to guard against occasions where "the worst" is to be found in the English text but where the original French is "le plus mauvais" not "le pire."
Lawlor (2007, p. 24).
He published an earlier paper which discusses the lesser violence and the worst in 2008. I am here taking the book to represent his considered view and will not discuss the differences between the two. Haddad (2008).
Haddad (2013, pp. 86–87).
Blackburn (2008, pp. 66–67).
Zuckert (2000, p. 71).
Ibid., 73, 77.
Norris (1986).
Derrida (1981, p. 117).
Derrida (2002d, p. 78).
In The Postcard from a couple of years earlier, Derrida makes a number of usages of the expression "the worst" but none of them appear to be self-aware coinages of a term. He comes very close though, speaking of "the worst of ‘final solutions’” and in relation to "the event" speaks of "the worst one." Derrida (1987, p. 16, p. 169). It would appear that working closely with Plato’s texts while writing the section on the pharmakon proved formative for the slightly later coinage of the term "the worst" which crystalised when confronted Lyotard’s usages in The Differend.
There is a slightly uncanny symmetry with one of his last usages of the term in Rogues. There he conjectured: "the worst to come is a nuclear attack that threatens to destroy the state apparatus of the United States." Derrida (2005, p. 105).
(Derrida, 1984b, p. 29).
This is reconstructed in a fine study by Crome (2004).
Derrida (2001c, p. 230).
Ibid., 223.
Derrida (1989b, p.40).
Ibid., 97.
Ibid., 121. Footnote 1 to page 60.
Maratti seems to observe something along these lines when she remarks: "the possibility of the good can always be converted into the accomplishment of the worst." This remark is made somewhat ex nihilo in a paper which does not otherwise discuss the term. It would also conflate a Levinasian reference to good with Derrida’s rather distinctive deployment of the worst. Maratti (2005, p. 71).
Derrida (1993b, p. 118).
Derrida (2002b, p. 257).
Ibid., 258.
Ibid. 261. Later he says, "the analogy with Schmittian or Heideggerian schemas does not need to be spelled out." Ibid. 281.
Ibid., 298.
Ibid., 298.
Ibid., 285.
In "Hostipality" Derrida says that: one must "forgive the unforgivable … the worst of the worst." Derrida (2002b), 385. A few pages later he speaks of forgiving "the worst possible wound." Ibid., 398.
Derrida (2001b, pp. 32, 33).
He says: "I have to ask, therefore, for forgiveness even before committing a determinable fault. One can call this original sin prior to original sin, prior to the event, real or mythical, real or phantasmatic, of any original sin." Derrida (2002b, p. 388). It is only by what cannot but be called an active solicitation on Derrida’s part that Caputo can develop deconstruction in the direction of theology in such a marvelous fashion in The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida. Caputo (1997). Contra Hägglund’s claims it is also important to note Derrida’s key argument in "Of an Apocalyptic Tone recently adopted in Philosophy" concerning, in Rapaport’s summary: "a certain discourse or rhetoric has been transmitted through religious writings that, in fact, cannot be suppressed or extirpated by philosophy on account of some appeal to enlightened thinking." Rapaport (2008, p. 112).
Derrida (2001b, p. 54).
In "Biodegradables" he says "the worst but also the best that one could wish for a piece of writing is that it be biodegradabale." Derrida (1989c, p. 824). We might understand what Derrida is saying here by looking at the word "deconstruction" which he coined in his thirties on the basis of a development of Heidegger’s term Destruktion. Its success, in being widely taken up in western culture, could be said to be both the best and the worst. To have a term pass beyond academic discourse into the wider common lexicon is perhaps the best any philosopher could wish for. But to the extent that by the time he died newspapers were using "deconstruct" as a synonym for "analyse" it was also the worst because the expression was being used without being understood.
Ibid, 32.
Hägglund (2008, pp 118–9).
He uses a somewhat evasive logic concerning "the immune" to attempt suggest that Caputo and other readers of Derrida who engage theology are somehow in pursuit of "salvation" and "immortality." Yet, an appeal to such ideas appears nowhere in The Tears and Prayers of Jacques Derrida. Hägglund has a very narrow idea of religion which one suspects owes much to generalising from forms of evangelical Protestantism myopically focused on promises of life after death. As such Radical Atheism might come across as a daring piece of iconoclasm to simple Swedish Sunday school teachers but it almost completely misses any engagement with post-Heideggerian philosophy of religion. Sadly, as is the nature of these polemics, Caputo’s brilliant and convincing booklength response will most likely be lost to those who found Hägglund’s claims most appealing. Caputo (2011, pp 32–124).
In two different places Derrida examines what "the best" means in Rousseau and and in Mauss, finding it difficult to distinguish from the worst. In Of Grammatology, he speaks of "unknowingly risking the best and the worst at the same time." Derrida (1976, p. 260). There is also the suggestion that "in the order of writing as in the order of the city, as long as the absolute reappropriation of man in his presence is not accomplished, the worst is simultaneously the best." Ibid., 295. Decades later, he extrapolates the logic of Mauss’ argument: "what is recommended is not just any compromise; it is the good one, the right one. Now, from his reflection and his inquiry into the gift, Mauss has learned that the pure gift or the gift that is too good, the excess of generosity of the gift—in which the pure and good gift would consist—turns into the bad; it is even the worst. The best becomes the worst." Derrida (1994a, b, p. 64).
Derrida (1994b, p.123).
Derrida (1993c, p. 19).
Ibid., 116, 121.
Derrida (1999, p. 35).
Derrida (2002a, p. 56). He also says that "there are, for the best and for the worst, division and iterability of the source." Ibid., 100.
Derrida (1998, pp. 47–48).
Simon Critchley frequently quotes it amongst other places in Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas and Contemporary French Thought. Critchley (1999, p. 273).
Derrida (1999, p. 117).
John Caputo and Alex Thomson also give brief mentions in passing and de Ville offers a more extensive discussion in a relatively recent paper. Critchley stresses that it is "an aimance for the other as mortal." Critchley (1999, p. 270).
Derrida (1993c, p. 181).
Derrida (1997, p. 83).
Derrida (2008, p. 53).
Ibid., 281–3.
Hägglund (2008, p. 76). In the face of such a failure there seems little point in making close readings of his argument. One might, however, once again note the distance between his claims and what Derrida argues. He tells us that survival means that the self inherently changes over time. But one can’t help feeling that what he writes about this idea in particular, fails to feel the full force of Derrida’s deconstruction of the self. The latter speaks of sur-vivre as an often passive living on where Hägglund gives us a survival that is almost Hobbesian: "the affirmation of survival can thus lead me to attack the other just as well as it can lead me to defend the other." Ibid., 165. When Hägglund talks about "when I live on" or "the survival of some at the expense of others" one feels he has not paid sufficient attention to all Derrida says about a self founded in alterity Ibid., 165, 166. By the last page of his book he is referring to "the logic of radical atheism"as "the drive for survival," a tone that we can’t help feeling is very distant from the complex account of a self that is passively affected by the other that Derrida gives us. Ibid, 205, 204.
Which is not to say they are entirely in accord. Critchley, for example, points to differences concerning questions of "fraternity, monotheism, androcentrism, ‘the family schema' (the son), "the political fate of Levinasian ethics, namely the vexed question of Israel." Critchley (1999, pp. 273–274).
We need to make, in principle, a distinction between Derrida’s politics, those particular positions espoused or supported by the philosopher during his lifetime, and the politics of deconstruction. The latter is a description of the structure of the political whereas the former are his particular choices as to what lines of political action to pusue. The distinction between the two is, of course, never clear cut.
McQuillan (2012, p. 172).
See the three major studies of war mortality for Iraq, two of which appeared in The Lancet and the third in the New England Journal of Medicine. Further analysis is provided in Tapp et al. (2008).
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Evans, M. The worst, the lesser violence and the politics of deconstruction. Cont Philos Rev 55, 267–288 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-022-09577-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-022-09577-w