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Deferring judgment: reading Derrida's reading against

the grain (1).
Publication: Studies in the Humanities Format: Online - approximately 5133 words
Publication Date: 01-JUN-04 Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Article Excerpt
In "Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority,'" Jacques Derrida states that Walter Benjamin's "Critique of
Violence" has a "possible complicity" with "the worst" (1045), by which he means the tendency to irrationalism that was
present in German thought in the period between the two world wars. He continues to say that we must judge the
possibility of such a complicity, and that "this defines a task and a responsibility the theme of which (yes, the theme) I
have not been able to read in [...] Benjaminian 'destruction'" (1045). Benjamin's text, he says, is too "messianico-marxist
or archeo-eschatological for me" (1045). However, and precisely since this statement appears in the context of the lecture
about justice that is Derrida's "Force of Law," it seems to me that there is still a space left to wonder whether the
description that Derrida gives of Benjamin's work is indeed a just one. Is it just to say that there is no "theme of
responsibility" in Benjamin's notion of destruction? Is it also the case that Benjamin's work can be seen without
ambiguity (for Derrida does, in other parts of his text, recognize the ambiguity of this particular text) as "messianico-
marxist"? How does Derrida interpret the questions of messianism and of Marxism in the work of Benjamin, both of
which were the subject of so much debate during Benjamin's lifetime and later among scholars? Does Derrida do
interpretive violence to Benjamin's text, in thus classifying it?

One is left to wonder about Derrida's silence on these questions, particularly vis-a-vis his claim in On The Name that a
discourse on responsibility (such as his, since it articulates the "task of responsibility" which he describes as lacking in
Benjamin's essay) "must submit to the norm or the law of which it speaks (9). "Clearly," says Derrida, "it will always be
possible to say, and it will be true, that a nonresponse is a response" (17). In "Force of Law" Derrida acknowledges that
he does not "justify absolutely" (977) his choice of Benjamin's "Critique of Violence," but he gives no further description
of how he sees his task of presenting this text to an audience, or whether he sees his description as a just one. How, then,
is one to speak about his silence, or rather, how is one to judge it? In my own status of reader of Derrida's "Force of
Law," I hesitate to claim responsibility for such a judgment, aware as I am of the forcefulness of Derrida's authority. As
an alternative, and in what is perhaps an exercise in apophasis, I propose not to be the judge but a (self-elected?
illegitimate?) advocate and present a different interpretation of Benjamin's "case." I will refer to other texts in order to try
to provide different "evidence," different interpretations, with which I may defer the moment of judgment and perhaps
even point toward a contamination (Derrida's expression [997]) or an affinity between the judge and the judged. This may
be, after all, the reason why Derrida has kept silent: he may have chosen not to speak of his own complicity.

In the second part of "Force of Law," Derrida gives a commentary and a historical contextualization of Benjamin's
"Critique of Violence." "This strange text," he insists, "is dated" (1040). As a text written in 1921, the essay cannot "bear
witness" (1040) to the phenomenon of Nazism nor to the deployment of the "final solution." Derrida, however,
acknowledges that he will do precisely that (1040). He argues that the text belongs to the great "anti-'Aufklarung' wave
on which Nazism so to speak surfaced and even surfed" (975). and he stresses the "troubling way" (991) in which right
and left revolutionary discourses in Germany of the 1920s resembled each other. His suspicion in what regards this text is
that Benjamin's point of view may ultimately prove to be complicit with Nazism. One may ask whether that is too heavy
a burden to place on the shoulders of one of Nazism's victims, or whether it is perhaps a safeguard that may ultimately do
justice to Benjamin in not allowing the reader to forget the complexities and tensions in his work.

According to Derrida, Benjamin's text resembles right-wing discourse in that it attempts to "justify the recourse to
violence by alleging the founding, in progress or to come, of a new law" (991). Although I will refer to the problem of
how to interpret the issue of a law "yet to come," the issue of Benjamin's messianism, later in this paper, at this point I

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would object that the recognition of the violent source of all law is not necessarily equivalent to a "justification" of
violence. In fact, it seems rather that Derrida shares Benjamin's insight when, in the first section of "Force of Law" he
writes that "[t]he very emergence of justice and law, the founding and justifying moment that institutes law implies a
performative force, which is always an interpretive force. [...] [Law] would maintain a more internal, more complex
relation with what one calls force, power or violence" (941). Law, for Derrida as much as for Benjamin, is instituted by
an act that breaks with, that rips apart, a former order.

The objection that Derrida poses to Benjamin's text has to do with the basic distinction that "Critique of Violence"
establishes between "mythical" and "divine" violence. Mythical violence, which in Benjamin's text proves to be identical
with "legal violence" ("Critique," 296), "pursues as its end, with violence as the means, what is to be established as law,
but fit the moment of instatement does not dismiss the violence: [...I]t specifically establishes as law not an end unalloyed
by violence, but one necessarily bound to it, tinder the title of power" (295). Legal violence is intrinsically bound to
power and it creates an endless chain of violence, a succession of laws that are founded and later overturned by new ones.
Every new law will make use of "law-preserving violence" in order to maintain its rule, until it is superseded by another
law which will in turn do the same. Benjamin sees in this cycle of violence of the mythical the "perniciousness of its
historical function" (296) and it is because of that perniciousness that he calls for the destruction of mythical violence
(297). It seems that, at least in this text, Benjamin's "destruction" aims at the correction of fin injustice. This is, however,
something that Derrida's reading overlooks.

That which confronts legal violence is for Benjamin "the divine" (297). Divine violence is the bloodless, law-destroying,
deadly, and expiating force that breaks the cycle of mythical forms of law, through which "a new historical epoch is
founded" (300). Derrida sees a contradiction that arises from this reflection, "the paradox of iterability" (1007): if divine
law founds a new epoch, it becomes part of the chain of law-making and law-preserving violence that it tried to
overcome, because "iterability requires the end to repeat itself originarily, to alter itself so as to have the value of origin,
that is, to conserve itself" (1009). This contradiction could be avoided if one were to insist, closely following the letter of
Benjamin's text, that the divine is that which is outside of this cycle. Benjamin's reference to a "new historical epoch"
would have to be understood as that which is "yet to come," something like the postponement of death discussed by
Emmanuel Levinas, (2) and which, if it is to constitute the end of mythical violence, must be beyond the historicity that
he has identified with the mythical. The interpretation that I am proposing runs the risk of doing an injustice to both
Derrida's and Benjamin's texts, since, after all, Benjamin also says that divine violence marks the beginning of a new
historical epoch. Nonetheless, the interpretation does not appear implausible if one takes into account that Benjamin has
described as "mythical" all violence that is directed to the creation of a new State and to the replacement of the present
order with a new one. Divine violence, in contrast, would open the way for something radically other, "the abolition of
state power" (300), something incommensurable with the present order and thus outside of it. As before, this problem
requires a reflection about the problem of the messianic, which I will again postpone.

In the recourse to divine violence, Derrida sees a kernel of irrationalism that may be appropriated by a totalitarian
discourse. If one follows Benjamin's schema, says Derrida, as soon as one leaves the order of mythical violence, "history
begins- and [with it] the violence of divine justice- but here we humans cannot measure judgments [...]. This also moans
that the interpretation of the final solution [...] is not in the measure of man" (1043). Since the project of Nazism is to
absolutely destroy all law, Derrida fears that the final solution can be interpreted as the outcome of divine violence, and it
may leave the temptation "to think the holocaust as an uninterpretable manifestation of divine violence insofar as this
divine violence would be at the same time annihilating, expiatory and bloodless" (1044). But Benjamin also says that,
even though divine violence is "possible" (300), "less possible [...] for humankind, however, is to decide when unalloyed
violence has been realized in particular cases. For only mythical violence, not divine, will be recognized as such with
certainty, unless in incomparable effect, (300). It seems that this statement would preclude anyone from identifying any
visible form of violence, including the final solution, with the invisible, incomparable violence of the divine. Benjamin's
divine violence, which stands outside mythical law and cannot be reduced to it, does not seem to be distant from the
"possibility of a justice, indeed of a law that not only exceeds or contradicts "law" (droit) but also, perhaps, has no
relation to law" (925) that Derrida wants to reserve as a possibility in "Force of Law." "Justice in itself, if such a tiling

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exists" (945), is for Derrida the very foundation of deconstruction. For Derrida, as for Benjamin, justice, or divine
violence, remains a possibility that is the ground for thinking.

Derrida's accusation of Benjamin in what regards the relation between his work and irrationalism leaves room for further
discussion. It seems that a contextualized reading of Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" along with other texts written by
him, might show that there is at least a tension between the themes of the rational and the irrational. Derrida might defend
himself by saying that the appellation to a context that guarantees the stability of the meaning of a text is contrary to the
procedure of deconstruction, and thus would be itself unjust toward his "method" of reading. (3) As a provisional defense
to this hypothetical accusation one could say that this proposed reading recuperates, not the fixed and stable meaning of
Benjamin's text, but rather the ambiguity that is excluded from Derrida's interpretation. The relation between Benjamin's
thought and rationality and the Aufklarung is more complex than what a reader only familiar with Derrida's interpretation
of this particular text might suppose. Derrida's silence compels me to speak about how Benjamin's texts repeatedly
challenge the irrationalism that their author saw as the threat that faced his generation, and from that perspective one
might say that they display a desire for the arrival of reason to human affairs, that may be faithful to Enlightenment
ideals. As Derrida himself notes, the very text under discussion presents itself as a "Critique," in the Kantian sense of
"judgment, evaluation, examination" (983), of the "dogmatic" belief ("Critique," 278) that "regards violence as the only
original means [...] appropriate to gill the vital ends of nature" (278).

One (Derrida) might object that the intention to criticize dogmatism is by itself not enough to guarantee the result of
Benjamin's, reflection. Still, it is necessary to acknowledge that the theme of the critique of dogmatism and irrationalism
occupies an important place in Benjamin's work. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" is one such
instance where Benjamin refers to his concern with the threat of the irrational. In this essay, Benjamin discusses the
"cult" (223) value of the work of art before technical reproduction, a situation in which "the uniqueness of a work of art is
inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition" (223). This situation is contrasted with the status of the
artistic object since the Industrial Revolution when, "for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction
emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual" (224). It would be unfair to try to disguise the
elusiveness of Benjamin's position before this situation, since he alternately praises and regrets the loss of the uniqueness,
the "aura" (222) of the work of art: in "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," for instance, the tone will be one of nostalgia at
this change. A "complete" look at Benjamin's work, if such completeness is possible, might show that there is a certain
"undecidability" on Benjamin's behalf in what regards the value of the loss of the ritual. In this essay, however, the
emphasis falls on the positive aspect of such a transformation, and the "emancipation" from tradition that appears as a
possibility, "for the first time in world history." The negative character of the ritualistic in this text becomes more visible
in the Epilogue, where Benjamin conjugates ritualistic cult with irrationalism, as evidenced by the phenomenon of
Fascism: "[t]he violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Fuhrer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in
the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values" (241). The ritualistic aesthetization of
war that Benjamin identifies in Fascism shows that "the self-alienation [of Mankind] has reached such a degree that it can
experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure" (242). Thus, the essay culminates with a vehement criticism of
the self-alienation, the irrationality, that surfaces in Fascism.

In his "Surrealism" essay, Benjamin praises the Surrealists' desire to renew the experience of reality and to rescue it from
the narcotic effect of habit. Benjamin discusses the Surrealists' attempt to achieve a "profane illumination" (179) by de-
contextualizing familiar objects and juxtaposing them in such a way as to cause the viewer to experience a "shock." This
"profane illumination" was for Benjamin a "creative overcoming of religious illumination" (179) that would allow
everyday experience to reveal its "true" potential. However, he considers that in this experiment there are also "disturbing
symptoms of deficiency" (179). In Convolute N of the Arcades Project, he states that, in spite of the initial drive toward a
more "critical" perception of reality, the Surrealist movement remains immersed in the realm of "myth" and "dream." His
concern instead is "to find the constellation of awakening [...H]ere it is a question of dissolution of 'mythology'" (458).
Distancing himself from the Surrealist experience, Benjamin defines the project of his study of the nineteenth century in
the Arcades book as follows:

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To cultivate fields where, until now, madness has reigned. Forge ahead with the whetted axe of reason, looking neither
right nor left so as not to succumb to the horror that beckons from deep in the primeval forest. Every ground must at
some point have been made arable by reason, must have been cleared of the undergrowth of delusion of myth. This is to
be accomplished here for the nineteenth century.... (457)