Deconstruction Is/In America. Anselm Haverkamp

version of being at home: “The substantive disagreement with Heidegger,” writes Cavell—as with Mitterand, wonders Derrida—is the disagreement shared by Emerson, Thoreau and Cavell himself, “that the achievement of the human requires not inhabitation and settlement but abandonment, leaving.”²¹ If the given is to be abandoned in favor of the impossible, of the gift that would have announced itself once in America and may announce itself today in Europe again, what politics does this announcement entail?

The handy reversal of terms which predicts the politics of de-construction as a deconstruction of politics is as well put as it is badly meant. Because it is the caesura of what is going on as politics that defines the “new sense of the political”—of politics deconstructed not in the sense of giving up the space of the political, but in the sense of keeping it deconstructible. Open to revision, but in a radical sense. Thus Derrida’s “The Politics of Friendship” cites the classical sources, through whom this topos politic is defined and in whose redefinition a new sense of the political is to be refound, remade and regained. This may not seem enough for those who overlook in this review the pragmatics of the caesura— a pragmatics involved in the application of rupture (as in the classical instance of strike)—and therefore complain about a “withdrawal from the specificity of politics and of empirical social research.”²² But is it not the very specificity of politics that asks for a refocusing within the frame given, “democracy,” and even of a refocusing of the frame as it is given and too easily taken for granted? The democracy that is as yet fully to come cannot be simply deduced, and thus be taken for coming, from a democracy as yet insufficiently reached. Unfortunately, one cannot say that the political critique and social research in question had come forward with what it had hoped for, and keeps hoping for on the premises of a critical theory that is obviously not critical enough to avoid turning hypocritical and cutting the wrong way now.

As Derrida has put it most pertinently in his closing remarks to this conference (I quote from memory): “What we have to do is to politicize the problems in a way that politics become just; not in politicizing as such and in itself, but in politicizing differently.” This includes a work of differentiating much easier to invoke than to carry out. A differentiation also of the politics of friendship, no doubt, that is still suffering from Euro-American self-centeredness, deeply buried in what Derrida most recently came to investigate as the “secret of European responsibility.”²³ But the patient work of deconstructing philosophy on the grounds of its particular European sources is not in itself Eurocentric, if it politicizes differently. It demands, as Gayatri Spivak has pointed out more than once, a decentering of deconstruction’s politics from its Euro-American homeground, the pretext of the Euro-American difference of this conference included. Deconstruction in America implies, and therefore will have to take care of, Americas beyond this America, in an America yet to be given.

In the world of difference to which America is more exposed than any other part of the world, Europe to follow, no principle of identity has to be erected. The state of difference in America asks for a differentiation of deconstruction’s “differing” the topos of difference with respect to the differences inscribed therein. “The challenge of deconstruction,” Rodolphe Gasché emphasizes, is the paradoxical necessity of taking the other as the other, other than me (and not just: the other me); it “is how to distinguish without judging and deciding; in other words how to do justice to what requires recognition on the basis of its singularity.”²⁴ That singularity is defined by difference and not to be mixed up with individuality in the older sense of an undivided, self-contained self, the subject of philosophical reflection. The politics of singularity, therefore, has to cope with another spacing, some “kind of asymmetrical and heteronomical curvature of the social space” according to Derrida’s description. Peter Eisenman has translated this spacial peculiarity into the time-qualification of a “present-ness” in architecture other than the time-effacing pomposity of the uniformly postmodern. Architecture as the pragmatic challenge to all utopias can be taken as the deconstructive chance of a nonutopian politics in many a sense, but most decidedly not in the sense of a preestablished symmetry to be imposed upon public places.

Let me risk an example, if only to do justice to the spirit of the place. Take the theatricality of a city like New York, a place in permanent destruction, in continuous decay, as it seems, but more precisely a city in permanent change, in gender trouble and racial controversy. It is here that one gets, now and then, a new sense of the political qua deconstruction. I do not refer to the corrupted state of city politics, which proves the old sense of the political to be “out of joint.” What I would rather refer to is how the failure of ordinary politics to “become just” has provoked a sense of the political expressing itself differently here—in mixed identities barely controlled by means of the police force and, by the way, only badly translated into the language of the media. A movie such as Paris is Burning, already noteworthy for its unfailing play on the Euro-American paleonym, had to compromise itself with the pathos of accredited concerns (the human interest stories of those involved), in order to deliver its message of drag and mimetic desire, of unsettling comedy. The discarded name of Harlem, which never comes up in the picture except in reference to the river, on whose distant banks the towers of wealth rise, points to no u-topos.²⁵ On the contrary, the utopian-minded Venus from the house of Xtravaganza dies shortly after the film was completed. Likewise the quotation of Paris stands for no burning other than the urgency of the performative. Nowhere else in America (and certainly not in the literal burning of L.A.) is the destabilization of established politics, the bastardization of race, the queering of gender more effective, and thus the constructive potential of deconstruction more obvious—not just in destroying the patterns of domination, and not only in ridiculing the pretensions of identity (both already considerable achievements in their own right) but in creating modes of transition, sex untroubled by gender, the frail acceptance of the other before and beyond affirmation. Sure, there is no such thing as ungendered sexes, but the parodic decomposition of gender—and there is hardly an example more significant these days—asks for the unconditional acceptance that is necessary for “becoming just.” Come, and see.

       Notes

      1. The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, eds. Richard Macksey, Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), notably Jacques Derrida’s closing remarks, following his intervention on “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” pp. 270–272.

2. Jacques Derrida, “The Politics of Friendship,” as read at the 85th annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, in December 1988, Journal of Philosophy 85 (1988), pp.632–645.

3. Barbara Johnson, A World of Difference (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p.15.

4. Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p.18.

5. Stanley Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America (Albuquerque: Living Batch Press, 1989), p.91.

6. See, most prominently, Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies