I do not believe in the conceptual value of a rigorous distinction between the private and the public.

There can be the singular and the secret, but these resist the ‘private’ as much as they do the
‘public’. In what I write one should be able to perceive that the boundary between the
autobiographical and the political is subject to a certain strain. (N: 17–18)

N Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001. Derrida 2002e.

Literature “Experience of Being, nothing less, nothing more, on the edge of metaphysics, literature
perhaps stands on the edge of everything, almost beyond everything, including itself” (AL: 47). Like
Miller and de Man, Derrida turns to the language of suspension when he speaks of literature: “There
is no literature,” he tells Derek Attridge, “without a suspended relation to meaning and reference”
(AL: 48).

Derrida argues that literature does not so much obviate the question of belief as it allows us to
experiment with it, trying out different positionalities (including a position of naiveté) in order to
understand something of positioning itself. The suspended experience of literature (including both
the suspension of disbelief and its morally and pedagogically-charged cousin, narrative suspense), is
an act of both holding back and giving over. It operates, as Derrida writes, “without annulling either
meaning or reference” (AL: 47). Literature holds us up, slows us down, exposes a general structure of
equivocation that is no longer simply the paralysis of indecision. Jonathan Culler argues that “Derrida
is practically unique in connecting the political significance of literature to the status we designate
with the term ‘fiction’: to its suspending or bracketing of reference, including reference to the
empirical author” (Culler 2008: 7). Here, suspension provides the hinge between the literary and the
political, again opening a critical space not reducible to transparency and gaining its force from an
ability to interrupt, irrevocably, the movement of referential thought. Derrida’s suspension does not
look to an end or a telos; its telos is suspension itself—the epoche - (the Greek word for suspension,
as well as phenomenology’s bracketing) and the aporia.

There’s an unavoidably aberrant dimension to the act of suspension— and not just in the literary
language of referential aberration. The suspension of disbelief has often been criticised as a form of
special pleading for authorial inadequacy or worse. Suspension is always the exception to the rule, a
gesture directed against law itself. It is both a punishment—one may be suspended from school or
from one’s position as the result of a serious infraction—and the mitigation of punishment (as in a
suspended sentence or the suspension of death—arrêt de mort— that occupies much of Derrida’s
attention in “Living On”). Yet the possibility of an unjust suspension of the rules is also, irreducibly,
the possibility of justice itself, a theme to which Derrida returns again and again. No justice without
aporia, without suspension. “[J]ustice,” Derrida writes, “would be the experience of what we are
unable to experience” (FL: 244)—an experience accessible only through the mental movement of
willing suspension. He opposes this justice to a concept of law, the “element of calculation”; the
suspensive power of justice is what takes us beyond calculation, into the critical space able to open
to the future.
Derrida himself claims that “deconstruction loses nothing from admitting that it is impossible” (PI:
15), but it is nonetheless difficult to remain always on the edge of the abyss, to embrace the
discomfort of the aporia. On the one hand, the demand for decision, beyond calculation, beyond the
horizon of the possible; on the other, the impossibility of deciding, inflexible and equally demanding.
Only a posture of suspension—holding back, giving over—can meet this contradictory situation of
“infinite speculation” (PI: 15). Suspension is not, for Derrida, the exclusion of anything, not repression
or forgetting, but a way of bracketing, keeping contingency present, including it, even though it no
longer serves the same inhibiting function.

Openness towards the future is not an endless, passive waiting for justice to come. Our
responsibilities already press hard upon us. Only in acting now, in affirming the archi-promise with a
“yes,” can we bring about justice. But justice itself will never come. There will never be a time when
freedom and justice are embodied fully in a constitution or a society. When people speak in such
terms, freedom and justice have already congealed into law. In such a society there may be a
tomorrow and a next week and a next year, but there is no future. The future consists of there being
always more justice to come, not because we converge only slowly upon utopia but because material
circumstances are always changing.

Derrida greatly admires a passage in The Writing of the Disaster (1980) where Blanchot tells the story
of the Messiah, the most just of all the just, sitting among beggars and lepers at the gates of Rome.
“When will you come?” he is asked by someone who recognises him. The question indicates that
there is a disjunction between the Messiah’s presence and his coming. Messianic time cannot be
calculated in terms of a past present, the present day, and a future present. Not at all: it isthe time
when justice occurs, a wholly other register of temporality. Justice does not happen, it occurs. To
grasp why this is so we must distinguish between law and justice. An act might be passed in the
Legislature and become law: on a particular day, over a given political space, new liberties or
obligations are declared that concern you and I. The law happens. No matter what the law says,
however, I cannot set a bound on my responsibility to you. Quite simply, I can have no theoretical
knowledge of my obligations. Contracts, programs and rules, along with other judgments of a
theoretical kind, can point out the sort of responsibilities I might have, but the extent of those
responsibilities cannot be determined, and I cannot have foreknowledge of situations to come that
might call for further acts on my part. No matter how much I work to help you– teaching you, caring
for you, fighting for your rights, and so on – I cannot say at a given time that I have behaved justly
to you. Justice does not occur in any time that has or will be present to my consciousness. It occurs,
if it does, in the archipromise that is prior to each and every specific promise and in the radical future
from which justice comes.

Religion without religion would be a radical openness to the future, an endless calling for justice. It
would figure faith as the credence we extend to the other person, and the holy as the singularity of
the other person. This is indeed religion without religion, without priests and liturgies, without
dogmas and superstitions. Notice, though, that it is not religion without hierarchy: philosophy
remains the judge of theology. Far more seriously, it might also be argued that it is also a religion
without God, that it reworks a classical ideal of philosophical virtue. The point needs to clarified
before being accepted or rejected. In “Faith and Knowledge” Derrida takes on board Kant’s view that
“in order to conduct oneself in a moral manner, one must act as though God did not exist or no
longer concerned himself with our salvation”
Even though the ethical has been a concern of Derrida’s from his earliest works, such asOf
Grammatology and “Violence and Metaphysics,” he has not explicitly discussed “ethics” (as a
metaphysical concept) in any sustained form. Rather he has taken a different approach by implicitly
raising the problem of metaphysical ethics in and through his deconstructive treatment of concepts
such as “responsibility”, “justice” and “law,” and “hospitality”, in books and essays such as the Gift of
Death, Of Hospitality, Adieu: To Emmanuel Levinas, Politics of Friendship, “Violence and
Metaphysics”, and“Force of Law”. Through these deconstructive “treatments” Derrida is able to
avoid offering an ethical principle or model to live by, or to regulate behaviour. He does not provide
us with an ethical treatise or philosophy, because to do so would be to perpetuate what ethics is, and
what deconstruction is not: a metaphysical concept. This is not to say that either deconstruction is
ethical, or that deconstruction opposes itself, and can be opposed, to ethics, and is therefore
unethical or nihilistic. It is neither ethical nor unethical because deconstruction is not, as Derrida
argues, a “method, critique, analysis, act or operation” (LJ: 4). To oppose the ethical to the unethical
would be to perpetuate the binary opposition on which metaphysics has been founded. This is why
deconstruction in this chapter is spelt with a lower-case ‘d’: so as to attempt to avoid turning
deconstruction into a proper noun with all the attendant problems this would entail. In other words,
deconstruction is not a ‘thing’; it is not a noun, which would characterise it as having an essential
nature. Deconstruction therefore is hard to define because there is not just ‘one’ deconstruction,
unchanging and metaphysical: instead as Derrida tells us there are only “deconstructions in the
plural” (Derrida in Papadakis 1989: 73), that is, deconstruction is “irreducibly plural” (FL: 56), because
it ‘is different from one context to another’ and “takes the singularity of every context into account”
(Derrida in Papadakis 1989: 73). For Derrida, then, “[d]econstruction takes place, it is an event that
does not await the deliberation, consciousness, or organisation of a subject, or even of modernity. It
deconstructs it-self. It can be deconstructed” (LJ: 4). For Derrida, this means:

The movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from the outside. They 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

In the kind of friendship I am talking about, if it were possible for one to give to the other it is the one
who received the benefaction who would lay an obligation on his companion. For each of them,
more than anything else, is seeking the good of the other, so that the one who furnishes the means
and the occasion is in fact the more generous, since he gives to his friend the joy of performing for
him what he most desires. (Montaigne 1991: 214)

In a perfect friendship, what each friend seeks the most is to do good for the other, to give to him. In
receiving, the friend allows the other to perform this good. Receiving a gift is thus the greatest gift
that a friend can give.

Derrida argues that this singularity introduces another aporetic couple into Montaigne’s account of
perfect friendship, involving a dual relation to the political and the apolitical. On the one hand, the
exceptional nature of such a friendship means that “no political project can predict, prescribe or
programme it.” The two friends are “heterogeneous to political laws,” above the law, and so
apolitical (PF: 182). But on the other hand, Derrida argues that this avoidance of the political is not
fully achieved in Montaigne’s text. While the singularity of such friendships is emphasised, they
remain in one respect subordinated to political law. For Montaigne’s perfect friendship, despite its
singularity,

For Aristotle friendships of virtue must be between equals, but there is dissymmetry in his claim that
it is better to love than to be loved (and Aristotle also prefigures the aporetic relation between
friendship and the political, arguing that friendship is necessary in the polis, and that the best
friendship lies above justice). Yet amidst these complications he similarly excludes women, confining
their relation to men within friendships of utility. Kant also negotiates the logics of sameness and
difference, avoiding the dangerous fusion of love by promoting distance through respect. But he too
appeals to fraternity, using the brother as the figure for the friend of humanity. And Michelet states
that “Fraternity is the law beyond the law” (PF: 182, 237), at the same time as positing it as the basis
of equality and democracy. But he also claims that women are never fraternal enough.

On the basis of detailed readings of writers from Aristotle to Nietzsche, he demonstrates that
democracy has repeatedly been imagined or analysed in terms of the friendship between brothers.
Derrida sees this as problematic on three grounds. First, friendship can imply the reciprocity of
mutual relations, but my responsibility to others goes beyond exchange: the condition of love is its
survival beyond the death of the beloved, hence it goes beyond any expectation of mutual or
reciprocal benefit. Second, equality is universal but I can only have so many friends. Third, friendship
can be elided into brotherhood, which substitutes a natural bond for a political bond, as if to show
that the decision to restrict goods to those closer to me were not only inevitable, but prescribed by
an external law. If we trace these out as an analysis of the state, we see a tension emerge.
Democracy is the regime in which the constitutive conditions of political community are most openly
brought to light, because both in practice and in theory democracy consists of a contradiction
between the embrace of, and the restriction of, equality.

This understanding of democracy prescribes some of the practical political implications that Derrida
develops in his writing. Although exorbitant, Derrida’s insistence on justice should be considered
realist rather than utopian. He is not asking us to do away with borders, but to recognise that no
state can live up to the demands of justice. The institutions and practices, norms and laws of
democracy both enable and limit the idea of equality: they can and must be criticised from the point
of view of equality. He is regularly critical of and hostile towards nationalism and other forms of
political identification that seek to justify or naturalise the restrictions implicit in democracy, while
supporting struggles around immigration, and supporting cosmopolitan and international
institutions. By heightening our awareness of this as a structural condition of democracy – that at the
very basis of its logic is a conflict between the unconditional and the conditional – Derrida challenges
our use of the term: we can never simply approve democracy, but nor can we dismiss it. What
distinguishes and privileges democracy in Politics of Friendship is that it connects to what Derrida
calls aimance: the structural possibility of the friendship of anyone with anyone, and friendship as
the dissymmetrical placing of the loved one before myself. We might see this as an idea of politics
prior to any political or cultural identification. But just as in practice I can only have so many friends,
this promise of democracy is only possible within certain limits; just as justice requires law, cities and
states require borders and boundaries. This becomes axiomatic for Derrida: “there is no democracy
without respect for irreducible singularity or alterity, but there is no democracy without the
‘community of friends’, without the calculation of majorities, without identifiable, stabilizable,
representable subjects, all equal” (PF: 22). There would be no justice without political community,
and the laws that guarantee equal rights to citizens. But a state is always de jure in breach of the
demands of justice because it draws limits between citizens and non-citizens. This poses a significant
challenge to our reliance on the idea of the state as the central source of political authority.