BISA Annual Conference

27th 29th April 2011

Manchester

Ordeals of Resistance: Derrida, Deconstruction, Aporia

Dr. Aggie Hirst

Liverpool Hope University
hirsta@hope.ac.uk

Please do not cite without authors permission

Introduction

The aim of this paper is to enact a double movement in the context of the question of
resistance in International Relations (IR). Mobilising the thought of Jacques Derrida, it
initially offers an account of resistance which focuses on disrupting the roles and functions of
ontology, though a conceptualisation of deconstruction and/as resistance. Such a mode of
resistance functions by continuously destabilising the ontological foundations upon which
any and all ethico-political and knowledge claims rely; it signals a counter-movement to
philosophic-political persuasions in IR and beyond which endeavour to construct opinions
and categories which masquerade as foundational, originary or transcendental. By this I
mean to suggest projects such as that of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss which engage in
securitising responses of binary and opinion construction which offset the perceived dangers
associated with the condition of foundationlessness that underpins modernity. If, as
Emmanuel Levinas argued, political totalitarianism rests on ontological totalitarianism,1
the movements of deconstruction can unsettle and subvert processes of ontological
totalisation, thereby resisting the instantiation of any and all (totalising) political
programmes. The paper thus suggests that a deconstructive intervention can interrupt the
processes of totalisation which reside at the core of such projects of construction, exposing
the violences, contingencies and exclusions they are predicated upon. It posits that
deconstruction is, consequently, always already political, and that it has purchase in
international politics as a means by which such programmes may be resisted without relying
upon any particular configuration of a priori categories or preferences, indeed by exposing
the violence and contingency of any such premises.
Tempting as it might be to begin and end with this account, if deconstruction is to be
an effectual mode of resistance in its own terms, if, in other words, it is to resist processes of
onto-political totalisation, it must also turn (in) on itself. Accordingly, the paper secondly
turns to the question of the aporias which reside at the heart of deconstruction, exploring
two interrelated challenges: that that deconstruction betrays a philosophico-political
conservatism, and that it risks a political quietism. Rather than arguing away these
challenges, the paper engages with possible responses to the experience of the unbearable
violence of active and direct political interventions2 which, I would submit, accompanies a
1

Emmanuel Levinas, Freedom of Speech, in Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p.206.
2
Attempting to distinguish between active/direct and non-active/indirect modes of interventions is clearly a
highly problematic venture. The operation of such binaries are violent, reductionist, and over-simplistic. By
using these indefensible categories here, I mean to point towards the tone of those political interventions that are
explicit, public, self-conscious and often celebratory, at which one is physically present, on the one hand, and
the tone of those that are spatially and temporally removed, implicit or incidental. It is also important to be

deconstructive temperament, at least as I understand it. Deconstruction removes any

possibility of justification, defensibility or shared responsibility for a decision taken, and
thereby makes active or direct intervention acutely difficult and painful. It will be argued
that the temptation to avoid these interventions by seeking refuge among the absent or the
dead should be challenged; the danger that philosophy becomes an alibi for self-imposed
exile from direct or active political spaces is something that should itself be resisted. The
paper thus also calls for a self-deconstructive gesture which is itself a moment of resistance
against the subjects self-presence, in other words, it calls for the auto-deconstruction of the
deconstructionist.
The paper concludes by both affirming and resisting Derridas thought in the context
of resistance: it affirms the mode of resistance made possible by the movements of
deconstruction, while resisting its affirmation as a mode of thought that rests, secure in itself
and its work. A deconstructive temperament makes possible such simultaneity by subjecting
everything, including and especially itself, to deconstructive challenges and disruptions. The
movement of the paper thus reflects the argument that a position can and always already is
taken, and that deconstruction does not, as is frequently insisted, prevent this, but that such
a position is always subject to self-deconstruction and contends with profound and
unsettling challenges, thereby being created and self-created anew. It also marks the pain
that accompanies these restless processes.

Deconstruction and/as Resistance

While perhaps not immediately associated with the concept of resistance, Derrida deals with
the notion explicitly in a1996 essay exploring the question of Freudian psychoanalysis. He
accounts for the title of the piece by noting that, [a]lmost without thinking about it, I
desired the word resistances, exercising the basic caution of putting it in the plural so as to
keep the exit doors clear. He continues:

aware of the danger of implicitly positing the possibility of inaction, or drawing a binary between action and
inaction. I begin from the assumption that one is always already intervening in politically significant ways, and
all the more when is not mindful of this.

But since then I have been constantly dreaming, rather than reflecting, about the
compulsion that dictated this word to me, so quickly, and I have been constantly
caught up in the knot of reasons why I love it.3
Derrida characterises this intrigue as an idiomatic interest, I could almost say idiosyncratic
interest, in the word resistance. He has, he reflects, always loved this word... This word,
which resonated in my desire and my imagination as the most beautiful word in the politics
and history of my country, this word loaded with all the pathos of my nostalgia.... 4 Such a
nostalgic and emotive engagement with the concept of resistance, that Derrida has dreamed
rather than reflected about it, may suggest something of a distanced relationship for
Derrida between his world or work and the praxis of resistance, as thought the concept is not
a familiar part of his political lexicon. However, the following will argue that Derridas
thought can be read as making possible a particular kind of resistance, following the
movements of deconstruction. Before expanding upon this, however, Derridas
conceptualisation of deconstruction warrants examination.
When pushed to give an account of deconstruction, Derrida responds that it would,
perhaps, consist, if at least it did consist, in precisely that: deconstructing, dislocating,
displacing, disarticulating, disjoining, putting out of joint the authority of the is.5
Deconstruction is to be conceived of, then, not as a thing, nor as an event, but rather as a
series of movements which interrupt processes of codification and be(com)ing, in other
words, the totalising processes that comprise ontology. In his words, he advocates a general
strategy of deconstruction, which disrupts the logos by avoiding both simply neutralizing
the binary oppositions of metaphysics and simply residing within the closed field of these
oppositions, thereby confirming it.6 Such deconstruction is always a matter of undoing,
desedimenting, decomposing, deconstituting sediments, artefacta, presuppositions,
institutions.7 What this might entail is that for every premise or construction ontology
attempts to enforce, i.e. every is, this process acts as a countermove, uprooting that which
attempts to present itself as originary or foundational, and thereby challenging the necessary
violence and exclusion of metaphysics.
Deconstruction is emphatically not a process of destruction; as Derrida states, the
movements of deconstruction do not destroy the structures from outside. 8 Rather, they
3

Jacques Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 25.
Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, p. 2.
5
Jacques Derrida, The Time Is Out of Joint, in Anselm Haverkamp, Deconstruction Is/In America: A New
Sense of the Political (New York: New York University Press, 1995), p. 25.
6
Jacques Derrida, Positions (London; New York: Continuum, 2002), p. 38. Emphasis in original.
7
Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, p. 27. Emphasis in original.
8
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, (Baltimore; London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997), p.
24.
4

expose that which has always been there, within metaphysics, by mobilising its own
resources against it, that is, by showing the limitations and contingencies which have always
already been present in philosophical claims and premises but which have been obscured.
He does not, then, intend to overturn or destroy metaphysics, but rather to expose what has
always been hidden therein, operating from a position inside it and using its own tools and
premises. This is emphatically not the same as destroying that which is constructed, neither
is it a refusal of the decision nor of intervention. It is rather resistance to the effacement of
the always only ever contingent, limited, spatially and temporally specific nature of such
categories, values and assumptions.
Deconstruction can thus be seen as a disruption of the text which comes from within
the text itself; it turns the rules of the text against the latter in order to show its limits and
what is obscured. In Derridas words, it is a question of remarking a nerve, a fold, an angle
that interrupts totalization.9 In the current context, this may usefully be thought of as an
occupation, in a sense which mirrors the occupation of space as a stratagem to effect sociopolitical change. Deconstruction may be read here as the occupation of metaphysics,
functioning in a manner similar to the occupation of space wherein prevailing social and
political modes of interaction are subverted; in Derridas words, the movements of
deconstruction are not possible and effective, nor can they take accurate aim, except by
inhabiting those structures. Inhabiting them in a certain way, because one always inhabits,
and all the more when one does not suspect it.10 In occupied space, people interact in ways
which disrupt the established norms of engagement, turning the rules of, say, a government
or university building in on themselves. Such rules are not destroyed but rather played with
such that they are subverted, their contradictions and silences exposed, their contingency
emphasised, and the violence of their dominance highlighted. Through a similar form of
occupation, deconstruction interrupts processes of ontological totalisation, disrupting the
power and function of the logos. Like an occupation of space, it does this from within,
situating itself within and engaging in practices of rewriting and disjoining such that
dominant norms and concepts are exposed as violent and contingent.
Such an occupation can be read as amounting to processes of resistance; the
movements of deconstruction can themselves be read as enacting resistance of a kind which
mirrors the occupation of space. Derrida identifies the drive and the pulse of its
[deconstructions] own movement, a rhythmic compulsion to track the desire for simple and
self-present originarity.11 Such tracking amounts, I would suggest, to a mode of resistance.
For Derrida, deconstructions movements work to identify and pursue tendencies of
9

Derrida, Positions, p. 42
Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 24.
11
Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, pp. 29-30.
10

totalisation or ontological consolidation, which may, as Martin McQuillan has suggested, be

referred to as textual activism.12 Such activism can, he claims, be read as a philosophical
insurgency (within metaphysics or the academy).13 He continues: deconstruction is more
important now than ever and this textual activism will be affiliated in unpredictable ways,
without determinable presence, to the material processes of the political.14 Such resistance
can only ever fail in the sense that it is never completed, an arrival or space of safety never
occurs, but it may point towards the taking of responsibility insofar as it exposes the
contingency and indefensibility of ontology. While it cannot it itself be deemed ethical, and it
cannot lead to the ethical, understood as an existing state of affairs, it can offer a means by
which to resist processes of ontological totalisation, which is, I would argue, a gesture
towards the taking of responsibility for the immanent violence of be(com)ing. This endless
and restless destabilisation of the totalising processes of ontology is what is meant by
deconstruction and/as resistance.
Such restlessness would be very difficult to maintain. It is certainly not possible in
terms of a resolution or arrival in a space outside of or after it, but the impossibility of its
realisation may be the condition of possibility of avoiding the realisation of ontology. What is
required, then, is an endless suspending qua the differing and deferring of differance, and
thereby the possibility of the taking responsibility for ones always already indefensible
position through an exposure of its necessary violence and contingency. For Derrida
it is a question of keeping the play in play, of playing along with the play, of avoiding
at all costs the repression of the play.... Metaphysics is the systematic attempt to
repress the play, to hold it in check: to create the illusion of abiding truth over and
against the flux; to posit metaphysical grounds which cannot be shaken; to
establish stable and transparent signs which lead us straight to pure presence.15
Such an intervention is already explicitly politically poignant and potent. This reading is
reflected in Campbells statement that, deconstruction is more than an approach that
problematizes seemingly coherent narratives and identities; it is an ethos that contests the
way violence is implicated in all dimensions of the political and its representation.16 In this
sense, it is a highly politically significant intervention. As Dillon comments,
through its commitment to think and not elide the aporetic character of the copresence of the ethical and political; through its insistence on the inescapability of
12

Martin McQuillan, Deconstruction After 9/11 (New York; Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), p. 32, 73; Martin
McQuillan, Textual Activism: Deconstruction and the Global Political, manuscript downloaded from
http://web.fmk.edu.rs/files/info/Martin_McQuilllan-Textual_Practice.pdf.
13
McQuillan, Textual Activism, p. 274.
14
McQuillan, Textual Activism, p. 9
15
John D. Caputo, Three Transgressions: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Research in Phenomenology, Vol.
15, No. 1 (1985), p. 74.
16
David Campbell, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia (Minneapolis; London:
University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 85.

assuming responsibility for that immeasurable task; and through its continuous
indictment of the hubristic eclipsing of undecidability by decidedness,17
deconstruction intervenes.
Derridas account of a deconstructive temperament thus has purchase as a mode of
resistance; he himself notes this by pointing out the resistance that it [deconstruction]
makes possible or that presupposes it.18 Such resistance intervenes at the level of ontology;
Derrida proposes that we must proceed by interrogating, in some sense deconstructing, the
limits of... onto-theological concepts.19 It would be tempting to end here, to advocate this
form of textual activism which provides an account, not to say alibi, which satisfies the
demand that one enacts resistance. However, deconstruction itself is not immune from the
experience of aporia, and cannot but, if it is to resist the temptation to self-exempt, and
thereby engage in practices of totalisation, turn (in) on itself.

Aporias of Deconstruction and/as Resistance

The deconstructive tradition with which Jacques Derrida is associated has frequently been
accused of being inactive, nihilistic, or useless as regards the business of analysing and
taking positions in ethico-political spheres. Its use as a mode of resistance is, consequently,
subject to challenge. Richard Rorty, for instance, contrasts it with the work of those like
Mill, Dewey and Rawls... whose work fulfils primarily public purposes, claiming it is not
politically consequential.20 He explains that there is considerable hostility towards Derrida
in academic circles; he is taken to be a frivolous and cynical despiser of common sense and
traditional democratic values by members of the Anglophone philosophical community,
many of whom attempt to excommunicate Derrida from the philosophical profession.21
Immanent to such challenges is a concern with the destabilising implications of Derridas
thought. David Campbell recounts the accusation that by questioning in a critical spirit all

17

Michael Dillon, Another Justice, Political Theory, Vol. 27, No. 2 (1999), p. 166.
Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, p. 30.
19
Jacques Derrida, in Paul Patton and Terry Smith, (eds.) Jacques Derrida: Deconstruction Engaged, The
Sydney Seminars (Sydney, Power Publications, 2006), p. 117.
20
Richard Rorty, Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism, in Chantal Mouffe (ed.), Deconstruction and
Pragmatism (New York; London: Routledge, 1996), p. 16.
21
Rorty, Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism, p. 13.
18

that is involved in the positing of the universal, a dangerous and licentious relativism is
celebrated.22 Similarly, as John Caputo comments,
many people associate deconstruction with the end of philosophy with a
destructive attitude towards texts and traditions and truth, towards the most
honourable names in the philosophical heritage.23
Derrida thus appears to be viewed by many as an antagonistic and disruptive figure whose
interventions risk undermining the very roots of the philosophical tradition.
At the heart of these objections resides the assumption that the disruption of
foundational premises, for which Derrida is known, risks a descent into relativism; in the
absence of stable ontological points of reference, ethico-political claims can, it is suggested,
no longer be made. Such apprehension is in evidence amongst many in the discipline of IR.
Robert Keohane, for instance, objects to the notion that we should happily accept the
existence of multiple incommensurable epistemologies, each equally valid. Such a view
seems to me to lead away from our knowledge of the external world, and ultimately to a sort
of nihilism.24 He continues:
I fear that many feminist theorists of international relations may follow the currently
fashionable path of fragmenting epistemology, denying the possibility of social
science. But I think this would be an intellectual and moral disaster... [because] in a
world of radical inequality, relativist resignation reinforces the status quo.25
For Keohane, a problematisation of epistemology appears to lead to a situation wherein
morality perishes, a relativist space wherein one is resigned to the status quo. This is
because, in Campbells words, the
end of philosophy the problematic turn that signifies, among other
developments, the Heideggerian critique of metaphysics and its many offspring
appears to pose something of a hurdle for thinking through the ethical challenges of
our era. Not least of these obstacles is the view that in the wake of the Heideggerian
critique, the ground for moral theory has been removed, because the ethos of moral
philosophy cannot remain once the logos of metaphysics has gone.26
Apprehension of this kind is also in evidence in Ken Booths invocation of Richard A.
Wilsons analogy: Rights without a metanarrative are like a car without seat-belts; on hitting

22

Campbell, National Deconstruction, p. 198.

John D. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2006), p. 4.
24
Robert Keohane, International Relations Theory: Contributions of a Feminist Standpoint, Millennium, Vol.
18, No. 2 (1989), p. 240.
25
Keohane, International Relations Theory, p. 250.
26
David Campbell, The Deterritorialization of Responsibility, in Campbell, D. and Shapiro, M., (eds.) Moral
Spaces: Rethinking Ethics and World Politics (Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p.
30.
23

the first bump with ontological implications, the passengers safety is jeopardised.27 Here,
the problematisation of ontology is noted for undermining the safety of those wishing to
engage in knowledge claims. In this account, while a fixed or stable set of ontological
premises would serve to secure the subject, disrupting or undermining these renders
him/her manifestly unsafe. The fear associated with this lack of safety seems to be related to
the possibility of knowledge and judgement: as Booth notes elsewhere, such thought offers
no escape from might is right.28
Such a fear of relativism, licence or the accession of the logic of might is right
highlights a fear that, without a sense of the good, immobilisation occurs. These objections
can be dealt with by noting that nothing in the movements of deconstruction prevents one
from making a decision and taking a position, indeed the decision must be taken in all its
undecidability. According to Derrida, there is no decision nor responsibility without the test
of aporia or undecidability.29 As Martin Hagglund notes, there is no opposition between
undecidability and decisions in Derridas thinking. On the contrary, it is because the future
cannot be decided in advance that one has to make decisions.30 And this argument holds;
provided one goes eyeball to eyeball with undecidability, stares it in the face (literally), looks
into that abyss, and then makes that leap, that is, gives itself up to the impossible
decision,31 the undermining of ontology does not result in immobilisation, relativism or
nihilism. In short, the absence of foundations or metanarratives does not lead to political or
philosophical indifference or relativism; the absence of foundations does not mean that
anything goes, but rather that each and every decision must be taken, and must be taken
responsibility for without recourse to any justificatory stories of rights, philosophies or
traditions. It has, however, also been suggested that such a deconstructive position obscures
a philosophic-political conservatism, that such an eyeball to eyeball encounter is forsaken in
favour of textual play, and that this results in a political quietism of the sort that results in
silent complicities. Such charges demand attention.

27

Ken Booth, (ed.), Critical Security Studies and World Politics (Boulder; London: Lynne Reinner, 2005), p.
270.
28
Ken Booth, Security and Emancipation, Review of International Studies, Vol. 17, No. 4 (1991), p. 316.
29
Jacques Derrida, Intellectual Courage: An interview by Thomas Assheuer, http://culturemachine.tees.
ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j002/art_res.htm#derr.
30
Martin Hagglund, The Necessity of Discrimination: Disjoining Derrida and Levinas, Diacritics, Vol. 34,
No. 1 (2004), p. 62.
31
Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, p. 137.

Philosophico-Political Conservatism
Many commentators have accused the deconstructive tradition of having conservative
propensities. Eagleton, for instance, claims that deconstruction undermines possibilities for
resistance because it betrays an anarchistic suspicion of institutionality as such, and ignores
the extent to which a certain provisional stability of identity is essential not only for
psychological well-being but for revolutionary political agency.32 The consequence of this,
according to Zavarzadeh and Morton, is that deconstruction betrays a conservatising
tendency; it amounts to a rather sophisticated reproduction of dominant values.33
To begin to trace this possibility, it is pertinent to examine, if this is indeed possible,
how deconstruction functions. There are, it would seem, certain features of deconstruction
which rely upon traditional modes and concepts of thought, as Derrida himself identified.
Deconstruction occurs from an aporetic and contradictory space; it is subject to a double
bind in light of which, and as a consequence of which, it moves. Derrida describes this
condition by proposing that the hyperanalyticism with which I identify deconstruction is a
double gesture in this regard, double and contradictory, doubly bound, which is to say,
bound/unbound in what one can call a double bind or double constraint. On the one hand,
he continues, it is bound to inherit and take inspiration from [the] Enlightenment... within
both the reason of a transcendental phenomenology as well as within psychoanalytic
reason... [and] within the existential analytic of Dasein..., while on the other it is bound to
analyze tirelessly the resistance that still clings to the thematic of the simple and the
indivisible origin, to oppositional logic... and to all that which, by repeating the origin,
attempts constantly to reappropriate, restitute, or reconstitute....34 In short, deconstruction
is caught in the bind of having to mobilise precisely the philosophical nodes and rules it
seeks to challenge in order to track and unsettle modes of thought and resistance which
totalise:
In order to prevent the critique of originarism in its transcendental or ontological,
analytic or dialectical form from yielding... to empiricism or positivism, it was
necessary to accede, in a still more radical and analytic fashion, to the traditional
demand, to the very law of that which had just been deconstructed: whence the
impossible concepts, the quasi-concepts, the concepts I have called quasitranscendentals, such as arche-trace or arche-writing...35

32

Terry Eagleton, cited in David Couzens Hoy, Critical Resistance: From Poststructuralism to Post-critique
(Cambridge; London: MIT Press, 2004), p. 209.
33
Masud Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton, cited in Hoy, Critical Resistance, p. 206.
34
Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, p. 35.
35
Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, p. 29.

10

This raises the question of whether this leaves too much intact, whether deconstructions
reliance upon precisely the traditional, violent categories and modes of thought it seeks to
destabilise amounts to a reformism rather than radical challenge to metaphysics.
Further conservatising tendencies can be perceived in other features of Derridas
thought. There are several ways in which teleological or totalising categories may be seen to
operate within it, in spite of his having so powerfully problematised them. This may firstly be
perceived in his use of the notion of perfectibility, in particular in relation to democracy
and laws. In the context of the laws he claims, we can change them, we improve them, we
want to improve the, we can improve them. 36 Similarly, he states:
we have to change the law, improve the law, and there is an infinite progress to be
performed, to be achieved in that respect. I love the process of perfectibility, because
it is marked by the context of the eighteenth century, the Aufklarung. It is often the
case that people would like to oppose this period of deconstruction to the
Enlightenment. No, I am for the Enlightenment, Im for progress, Im a
progressivist. I think the law is perfectible and we can improve the law.37
Such a stance would appear to uphold and consolidate teleological and Westerncentric
features of Enlightenment thought.
The question of faith here also warrants mention, specifically in terms of the question
of the messianic. While Derrida is clear that he intends the notion to function without the
promise of a known or anticipated arrivant, a messiah, his use of the term cannot be entirely
dissociated from this heritage. Derrida claims that he will never be ready to renounce a
certain emancipatory and messianic affirmation, a certain experience of the promise that
one can try to liberate from any dogmatics and even from any metaphysico-religious
determination, from any messianism.38 This demonstrates Derridas intention to empty out
the onto-theological dimensions of the messianic, but whether or not he succeeds finally in
this may not be certain. Indeed, it may be justifiable to suggest that this amounts to a
substitution of an explicitly non-secular messianism for a secular movement which
nevertheless functions in precisely the same manner. This poses the question of whether the
attempt to liberate messianism from religious dogma may not be enough to ensure that it is
not rendered indistinguishable from a messianism with the promise of a messiah. In other
words, in a similar manner to the performance of strategic essentialism amounting simply to
essentialism given its status as a performative endeavour, it may be suggested that

36

Jacques Derrida, Justice, Colonisation, Translation, in Patton and Smith, (eds.) Jacques Derrida, p. 87.
Jacques Derrida, Hospitality, Perfectibility, Responsibility, in Patton and Smith (eds.) Jacques Derrida, pp.
99-100.
38
Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International
(New York; London: Routledge, 2006), p. 89.
37

11

messianicity without the messiah leans towards the reassurance of the promise of the
resolution brought by the expected and known arrivant.
The issue of the conservatism of Derridas messianicity is especially significant in the
context of resistance. It suggests, perhaps, a certain suspension of action, a certain tendency
to await rather than intervene. According to Marcel Sarot and Wessel Stocker,
the activism that is characteristic of modernity has to be abandoned, or at least
suspended. What is required is simply an openness to receive the supplement to the
existing law (and it is this supplement that is the concern of deconstruction). Herein
lies a passive moment. The new, or the other, is something that in the first instance
we cannot bring about ourselves. It appears to us, it comes, or in other words: it is
messianic.39
Such passivity may be at odds with the imperative to struggle against processes of
totalisation; the restlessness of deconstruction and the awaiting of a messianic promise, even
if the identity of the arrivant is unknown and unknowable, seem to be of substantively
different tones.
Such questions may also be raised in the context of Derridas commentary relating to
the Kantian regulative idea. The concept of the to come, the messianic promise, has been
characterised by certain commentators as closely resembling the regulative idea. For
instance, Giovanna Borradori states to Derrida that his notion of justice to come sounds like
a regulative idea, though I know you do not like this expression...40 In Force of Law
Derrida broaches exactly this question, stating:
I would hesitate to assimilate too quickly this idea of justice to a regulative idea in
the Kantian sense), to a messianic promise or to other horizons of the same type...
One of the reasons Im keeping such a distance from all these horizons from the
Kantian regulative idea or from the messianic advent... is that they are, precisely,
horizons.41
Similarly, Derrida insists that to the regulative Idea in the Kantian sense... I would not want
the idea of a democracy to come to be reduced.42 The problem with such a notion is, as
Beardsworth notes,
the content of this Idea necessarily finds form in the form of universality. This form
also reduces ethical orientation to an easily rehearsed programme of judgement. By

39

Marcel Sarot and Wessel Stoker (eds.), Religion and the Good Life (Assen: Royal Van Gorcum, 2004), p.
218.
40
Giovanna Borradori, Autoimmunity, in Borradori, G., Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with
Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 133.
41
Jacques Derrida, Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority in Cornell, D., Rosenfeld, M., and
Carlson, D. G., (eds.), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (New York; London: Routledge, 1992), p.
24.
42
Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 83.

12

making the principle of ethics universality, Kant banishes, in the name of ethics, the
risk of ethical judgement... the very condition of ethical orientation.43
This means, he continues, that in the very name of less violence (the regulative Idea of
freedom as a horizon to time and space), Kant ends up being violent by refusing a necessary
relation between law and violence.44 This suggests that the mobilisation of the regulative
idea imposes a universalising foreclosure which removes the condition of possibility of
taking the undecidable decision and thereby gesturing towards the taking of responsibility
for the decision; recourse to a known, stable universal principle necessarily defaults on
responsibility.
However, it may be that such a reliance is at work in Derridas thought. He states:
the regulative idea remains, for lack of anything better... a last resort. Although such a last
resort or final recourse risks becoming an alibi, it retains a certain dignity.45 This suggests
that Derrida saw some purchase to the regulative idea. Significantly, however, Derrida
phrases his possible mobilisation of the concept as a temptation or slip; he states: I cannot
swear that I will not one day give in to it.46 This appears to suggest that he feels himself
tempted to resort, as a last resort, to this concept. This sentiment is echoed elsewhere:
For lack of anything better, if we can say this about a regulative idea, the regulative
idea remains perhaps an ultimate reservation. Though such a last recourse risks
becoming an alibi, it retains a certain dignity. I cannot swear that I will not one day
give into it.47
This statement demonstrates the will to resist which, I have argued, resides at the core of the
deconstructive project, but also, crucially, that Derrida felt himself at risk of giving in to the
security offered by a concept like the regulative idea. That Derrida appears to have felt,
towards the end of his life, unsure as to whether he would not slip into the use of such an
alibi demonstrates the profundity of this struggle. This may be said to amount to a
recognition of the possibility of a slip from the deconstructive resistance his thought enacts
through the utilisation of the notion of the regulative idea. Thus the notion that elements of
Derridas thought are closely tied to conservative features of Enlightenment and
metaphysical thought may be difficult to deny. Such connections may be one reason why
Derridas thought has been accused of conservatism.48

43

Richard Beardsworth, Derrida & the Political (London; New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 64.
Beardsworth, Derrida & the Political, p. 69.
45
Derrida, Rogues, p. 83.
46
Derrida, Rogues, p. 83.
47
Derrida, Autoimmunity, pp. 133-134.
48
It is beyond the scope of the current paper, but an examination of the ways in which, paradoxically, it is a
renunciation of precisely the values of reason, rights and metanarratives which reside at the core of
Enlightenment thought, indeed the Western philosophical tradition more broadly, that have led others accuse
deconstruction of conservatism.
44

13

Political Quietism
In addition to charges of conservatism, it has also been claimed that the deconstructive
temperament leads to political quietism or ethico-political immobilisation. Eagleton has
argued that deconstructions abyssal spiral of ironies... is commonly coupled with a political
quietism or reformism,49 which leaves its adherents too drearily enamoured of closure to
do the committee work, photocopy the leaflets and organize the food supplies.50 Similarly,
Derridas thought has, as Catherine Zuckert demonstrates, been charged with depriving his
readers of the capacity to think, much less act on their own behalf. This means, she
continues, that we may be freed from complete domination, but we are not free to do
much.51 Part of the reason for this immobilisation is, it has been suggested, that Derrida
privileges the realm of philosophy, and reads the real world solely in its terms. According to
Michel Foucault, Derridas thought exhibits a profound philosophical interiority,52 in which
the latter presides over a reduction of discursive practices to textual traces....53 Such textual
interiority suggests a transgression insofar as the external world becomes subsumed beneath
it, and textual play takes precedence over engagements and encounters of real world
politics.
Such a challenge cannot simply be dismissed; it is, perhaps, not inaccurate to suggest
that deconstructions restless destabilisation of foundations and points of reference from
where the good, ethical or emancipatory may be inferred renders highly problematic an
engagement with emancipatory counter practices because such practices, like all practices,
cannot be defensible, are limitlessly violent and deconstructible . The deconstructive position
emphasises the limitless and irredeemable violence of any and all politics and interventions.
Indeed, this is its mode of resistance: it resists the foreclosure of any and all ontological
categories which are the condition of knowledge about the good. It also highlights the
indefensibility of claims to lesser violence, both because this is unknowable and because it
legitimates actions which bypass the irreducible undecidability of the decision and thereby
default on the endless and unrealisable task of attempt to take responsibility. It thus makes
active or direct political intervention acutely painful; in undertaking action of this kind,
one has to do so in the knowledge of its violence and indefensibility, rather than within the
any reassurance of its emancipatory implications. This may, I would suggest, lead to a
reticence to engage in certain explicit interventions. In the absence of any confidence that
49

Eagleton, cited in Hoy, Critical Resistance, p. 193.

Eagleton, cited in Hoy, Critical Resistance, p. 209.
51
Catherine Zuckert, The Politics of Derridean Deconstruction, Polity, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Spring, 1991), p. 254.
Emphasis in original.
52
Michel Foucault, Reply to Derrida, in Michel Foucault, History of Madness (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006),
p. 578.
53
Foucault, Reply to Derrida, p. 578
50

14

one acts for good, and in full awareness of the unbearable violences, both predicable and
unpredictable, that one not only risks but ensures, in short, acting solely on the basis of ones
own decision, it is no surprise that a life spent engaging with the absent and the dead
appears more appealing.
Engaging with the concept of resistance, indeed resistances, from this space may thus
characterised as an experience of ordeal. Because all acts are indefensibly and unbearably
violent, meaning that identifying and pursuing emancipatory goals is highly problematic,
enacting resistance is a traumatic and painful process. This means that one has to struggle
against both the temptation allowing oneself to sidestep this by effacing the violence by
assuring oneself that one is doing the right thing, and against the simultaneous and
consequent temptation to evade the encounter. Given the unbearable violence of any and all
(counter) practices, challenging the ontological structures upon which totalising politics
depend appears preferable, but risks leaving prevailing practices intact as the subject refuses
to engage outside the sphere of academic engagement, leaving such practices unchallenged.
The danger associated with this is that active or direct political interventions, whether
writing to an MP, participating in a demonstration, occupying a building, or linking arms in
front of a police line, are almost impossible to face without some sense that one is justified.
As Terry Eagleton has claimed,
if political practice takes place only within a context of interpretation, and if that
context is notoriously ambiguous and unstable, then action itself is likely to be
problematic and unpredictable. This case is the used, implicitly or explicitly, to rule
out the possibility of radical political programmes of an ambitious kind.
This, he continues, plays right into the hands of Whitehall or the White House.54
At the risk of oversimplification, such an account of resistance as an ordeal may be
contrasted with accounts of which emphasise possibilities for emancipation. Jenny Edkins
and Veronique Pin-Fat suggest as much in their description of multi-layered resistances that
are the fabric of political life, and that can and do change things for the better. They claim:
Pessimism is not justified, for just as relations of power can form a dense web that
seems to solidify into institutions like the state and sediment into forms of
domination, so points of resistance can come together to lead to revolution. 55
Part of this possibility lies, for Edkins and Pin-Fat, in advocating a resistance to the drawing
of lines, understood as a refusal to play sovereign powers language-game and follow the

54

Eagleton, cited in Hoy, Critical Resistance, p. 193.

Jenny Edkins and Veronique Pin-Fat, Introduction: Life, Power, Resistance, in Jenny Edkins, Veronique
Pin-Fat and Michael J. Shapiro (eds.) Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics (New York; Abingdon:
Routledge, 2004), p. 5.
55

15

rules of the counting and as such, vitally, it defies and refuses its grammar.56 Here,
resistance is possible in the form of finding modes of interaction which are somehow less
violent than those enacted by sovereign power; thinking and acting otherwise can offer
emancipatory outcomes that can resist the danger of foreclosure, for instance by engaging
in modes of interaction which are non-conventional, non-statist, non-sovereign, and nonbiopolitical.57 This logic may be characterised by three features: firstly, emancipatory goals,
whether revolution or more local, limited changes, are can be aimed towards through
intervention; secondly, resistance is always already happening as it is bound up in the
constitution of the subject and power relations; and finally, resistance occurs in enacting
alternative and less violent counter practices which aim at emancipatory outcomes. It thus
may be termed emancipatory resistance.
In contrast to such a resistance that preserves an emancipatory agenda, the
experience of ordeal that accompanies active or direct political intervention in the first
formulation is concerned with the endless task of taking responsibility for the indefensibility
of be(com)ing. Far from being able to posit a lesser violence or refuse to play the games of
sovereign power, it recognises the irredeemable imbeddedness of the subject in the grammar
of violence, and restlessly destabilises both the subject and its interactions to try to take
account of this. From a deconstructive perspective, positing a lesser violence, claiming to
have created or discovered counter-practices that resist the danger of foreclosure is to efface
the violence of any and all games. By disrupting any and all such games, a deconstructive
intervention begins from acknowledging its own transgression and complicities, perhaps the
greatest of which is to claim innocence.
The quandary that results from this perpetual destabilisation is the risk that it leads
to an evasion of active or direct interventions. While Derrida is undoubtedly
philosophically radical, indeed insurrectionary perhaps, as a consequence of the endless
disruption that deconstruction as a mode of resistance entails, it may be, and in my
experience, is, tempting to shy away from confrontational circumstances wherein one must
make impossible decisions. As McQuillan asks, what is the imaginary of... textual activism
compared to the sort of action, such as the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, on which
[Western academics] have provided ample commentary but which as Western or
postcolonial intellectuals they are not obliged to participate in? 58 In short, my fear is that
the ceaseless movements of deconstruction lead to a response of evasion when it comes to
active or direct resistance. Such an evasion has nothing to do with the physical danger one
might expose oneself to under certain circumstances, but rather a recoiling from enacting
56

Edkins and Pin-Fat, Introduction: Life, Power, Resistance, p. 15.

Edkins and Pin-Fat, Introduction: Life, Power, Resistance, p. 15.
58
McQuillian, Textual Activism, p. 274.
57

16

something direct and vigorous under conditions of foundationlessness, in concert with

people who often do not, themselves, experience such discomfort, who enact their
interventions safe in the knowledge of their emancipatory implications. That deconstruction
takes account of the aporetic condition within which it operates does not in itself suffice as
an alibi; one must expose oneself each and every time to aporia of each and every decision,
not remove oneself from the encounter. If such evasion occurs, this must be addressed as its
own acute violence insofar as it fails to hear the call of the other and the call to the decision;
it evades both. That defensible answers to pressing political issues are not forthcoming, that
each and every decision is synonymous with violence should not result, in other words, to a
quiet acquiescence from those of a deconstructive temperament, to the workings of sovereign
power, because such silence feels like a lesser violence. It is not. It is, perhaps, the worst kind
of complicity precisely because it does not register as intolerable.
An aporia thus presents itself. In the commitment to endlessly deconstruct, one
radically undermines the points of reference which are important, not to say vital, for feeling
oneself able to engage in direct or active political interventions. The attempt to gesture
towards taking responsibility for the immanent violence of be(com)ing can thus result in the
evasion of particular kinds of encounter, thereby failing to respond to the calls which inhere
therein. A double bind is reflected in that if one confronts the undecidable decision in the
context of such direct or active political intervention, one never succeeds; the task is always
too big, ongoing, and the action is always irreducible violent in ways that one both can and
cannot predict. Yet if one does not, if one follows ones instinct to flee from the undecidable
decision, to withdraw to (an illusory) safety, one leaves others to put themselves in harms
way, and defaults on the ceaseless chasing of an elusive responsibility which is the point of a
deconstructive intervention. Either way, one fails. Either way, ones instincts conflict
mercilessly.

Conclusion

There are many tempting means by which it may be possible to evade or dispense with these
uncomfortable issues. Firstly, all of this, of course, begs the question of sites and types of
resistance. As mentioned above, deconstruction amounts to its own insurrection, in terms of
metaphysics, and, perhaps, the university. Mittelman and Chin note that

17

it would be facile to conceptualize resistance only as declared organized oppositions

to institutionalized economic and military power... To grasp resistance to
globalization, one must also examine the subtexts of political and cultural life, the
possibilities and potential for structural transformation.59
Blieker similarly suggests that one can learn from subversions of linguistically entrenched
forms of domination, which can facilitate understanding of how dissent functions in more
mundane daily contexts, which, by definition, mostly elude the eyes and ears of intellectual
observers.60 He explains that such linguistic dissent works slowly, by changing the way we
speak and think about ourselves and the world we live in.61 Perhaps, then, such forms of
resistance might appeal to those for whom intervention cannot be justified.
Concurrently, one may emphasise again the indefensibility and violence of the
distinctions made here between direct, active interventions and indirect modes of
resistance. The paper has invoked a difference between types of intervention which is in
many ways illusory; philosophy, activism and all kinds of intervention are interconnected,
mutually constituting and mutually reinforcing in innumerable ways. It is also worth noting
that it has not been shown here whether and why direct and active modes of intervention
are important; the above assumes that such political action should take place, that such
intervention is important at this particular historical juncture. Rather than defend any of
these impossible claims, the concern here is to point towards a sense of the insufficiency of
any one mode of resistance in isolation, and mark the danger that philosophical radicalism
works to satisfy ones sense of the need to intervene. This is not to reject or discredit
philosophy but rather to caution against the silences and complicities it risks.
I would argue that the aporetic dimensions of deconstruction as a mode of resistance
explored above should not be explained away, avoided, or otherwise obscured but rather
experienced, each and every time, in each and every decision. Such an impossible decision
can only be endured in its tension... By definition a double bind cannot be assumed; one can
only endure it in passion. Such a double bind cannot, Derrida explains, be fully analyzed:
one can only unbind one of its knots by pulling on the other to make it tighter, in the
movement I have called stricture.62 This is precisely the strength of the deconstructive
temperament: it always already also begins with a resistance to the double bind of its radical
project which relies upon traditional, and traditionally violent, modes and categories of
thought. Deconstruction not only lays bare its own aporetic, contradictory condition but also

59

James H. Mittelman and Christine B. N. Chin, Conceptualising resistance to globalisation, in Amoore

(eds.), The Global Resistance Reader, p. 17.
60
Roland Bleiker, Political boundaries, poetic transgressions, in Louise Amoore (ed.), The Global Resistance
Reader (Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2005), p.411.
61
Bleiker, Political boundaries, poetic transgressions, p. 419
62
Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, p. 36

18

radicalizes at the same time its axiomatic and its critique of its axiomatic. What is put into
question by its work is not only the possibility of recapturing the originary but also the desire
to do so... the desire to rejoin the simple....63 It is thus both counter-archeological, in that it
disrupts the architecture of metaphysics, and counter-genealogical insofar as it disrupts its
own telos, history, presence. It, in short, drives one to put into question even this principle
of self-presence in the unity of consciousness or in this auto-determinism....64
Deconstructions strength as a mode or site of resistance is not, then, its capacity to account
for or explain away its transgressions, but rather to be affected by them, to take the
challenges into itself, to make and remake itself anew in light of them.
Accordingly, the paper both affirms and resists Derridas thought. It affirms the
modes of resistance that he elucidates through his account of deconstruction, while
simultaneously resisting an affirmation of his thought that becomes static or given, by
subjecting deconstructive modes of engagement themselves to deconstruction. In short, the
paper affirms Derridas resistance while resisting his affirmations, affirmations which he
himself unsettles and thereby resists through the movements of his engagement. Herein lies
the importance of the traces and asymmetric, indirect modes of approach which characterise
Derridas interventions. As Doel notes, deconstruction works
through a disseminating series of elliptical, enigmatic, and stop-gap figures:
supplements, grafts, folds, undecidables, quasi-concepts, special effects, traces, etc.
Yet all of these encryptions are irreducibly faulty. They work by breaking down,
disintegrating, and haemorrhaging meaning and sense in all directions.65
Such movements mark the indivisible violence and indefensibility of any (of his) claims.
This may be extended to call for resistance to affirmation more generally. This is
proposed not so that affirmation ceases but rather so that its violences are better accounted
for. What is reperformed or risks reperformance in much current activism is often
insufficiently contended with; militarisms and masculinities abound, hierarchies are
reordered and inverted, and thereby perpetuated. Such violences are frequently overlooked
as the crucial injustice of the cause in question appears to take precedence. A deconstructive
mode of resistance addresses and draws out these transgressions, exposing and holding
them to account. Such an intervention is not to undermine the idea of commitment to
causes, nor to addressing violences in world politics, but rather to insist that modes of
resistance must contend with their own violences, omissions, and complicities, and avoid the
good conscience of doing or being right which is the condition of possibility of ontological
63

Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, p. 27.

Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, p. 28.
65
Marcus A. Doel, Poststructuralist Geographies: The Diabolical Art of Spatial Science (Lanham: Rowman
and Littlefield, 1999), p. 139.
64

19

and political totalisation. This applies as much to modes of resistance which privilege the
disruption of ontology and thereby evade taking responsibility for the explicit or implicit
violences that accompany such philosophic focus, as to those which advocate emancipatory
counter practices which risk leaving ontological structures in place. In Derridas words,
one must avoid good conscience at all costs. Not only good conscience as the grimace
of an indulgent vulgarity, but quite simply the assured form of self-consciousness:
good conscience as subjective certainty is incompatible with the absolute risk that
every promise, every engagement, and every responsible decision must run. To
protect the decision or the responsibility by knowledge, by some theoretical
assurance, or by the certainty of being right, of being on the side of science, of
consciousness or reason, is to transform this experience into the deployment of a
program, into the technical application of a rule or a norm, or into the subsumption
of a determined case.66
Deconstruction must find a way to resist the temptation to contain itself within textual play
of the isolated kind, despite the directness, exposure and unbearable violence that this
entails. Nietzsches insistence that those engaging in philosophy should be inquisitive to a
fault, investigators to the point of cruelty,67 must be extended to unsettling the temptation
to withdraw, precisely because such self-exemption reflects a good conscience that detrays a
defaulting on responsibility of the kind deconstruction explicitly challenges. The horrors of
the contemporary world must pull one again and again back into the ordeal of resistance,
and compel one to take undecidable decisions, not simply from ones study but also in the
streets.

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