A suggestion by one of my supervisors sent me back to Derrida’s little essay on cosmopolitanism (an address delivered in 1996 to the International Parliament of Writers). In it Derrida, briefly, schematically, but very lucidly, draws out his thinking on hospitality with respect to the European tradition of cosmopolitanism.
I happened to have a copy of Alex Thomson’s Deconstruction and Democracy lying around at home, which has a chapter on hospitality and cosmoplitanism, so read that too. Revisiting Derrida’s essay was such a good idea (my supervisor knew what she was doing, telling me to read it) – such a brilliant example of Derrida’s thinking at work in concrete political situations, with concrete (conditional) inscriptions of what Derrida calls unconditional laws. But Thomson’s chapter, too, was excellent. In particular, its way of drawing together other texts of Derrida’s to show patterns that I had not otherwise noticed. In particular, it made sense of sections of Specters of Marx – the 10 ‘plagues’, and the discussions of the institutionalisation of Marx-as-philosopher – that connected these to wider analyses.
Matthias Fritsch, author of a very interesting book that deals with Specters, The Promise of Memory, has a review of Thomson’s book here. (I love the NDPR.) He makes some interesting criticisms of Thomson’s book, which, not having read all of, I cannot claim to comment on. However, he also makes some interesting general comments about the process of reception, inheritance and reading – the situation we find ourselves in with respect to Derrida.
Derrida scholarship finds it hard to get beyond the disjunction between critical yet unfaithful and faithful but not (yet) sufficiently critical and probing responses. While the former, as reactions to his death about a year ago amply demonstrated once more, is often too impatient to avoid setting up a straw man to criticize, the latter, while clearly to be preferred, tends to be so close to Derrida so as to content itself with explicating his arguments rather than also questioning their basic assumptions and effects. [...]
[A]nalytical persistence and acuity, however, remains a promise of work on Derrida that is, by and large, still caught between the poles of faithful exegesis and impatient criticism. Since we can progress toward critical yet faithful discussion only by way of the former route, Thomson’s book is a welcome event.
These two comments operate basically as parentheses of the entire review. Mid review, while considering Thomson’s description of deconstruction as a form of hospitality, Fritsch observes:
Thomson remains exegetical even when he confronts Derrida … his guiding assumption always is that Derrida is right … even in cases where his book lacks the space to give others a fair hearing. … This might be disturbing given Thomson’s suggestion as to the hospitable openness inherent in Derrida’s own reading practice. … Thomson is here not interested in treating thinkers other than Derrida with the same principle of charity
The bind and division which one finds in hospitality, the cosmopolitan, or the host of other concepts that Derrida analyses, is also present here in the choices made about reading. For Fritsch points out that the very helpfulness of Thomson’s book consists in the point that
[G]iven how much we still have to learn about Derrida’s incisive contributions to political philosophy, Thomson’s faithful approach is helpful in part for the very reason of this neglect.
In reading, commentary and criticism there are pragmatic constraints. There are concrete rules which one must abide by in order to say something that will successfully communicate the point. There is a need to privilege the writer, concept, topic under consideration. One must select this author and not that as significant. One must make assumptions that allow one construct an argument and make a point, even when those assumptions make that point tremble. Which is to say, there is an economy of violence at work.
These are basic points, of course. (Still worth formulating however – especially for a PhD student!) But where does this leave us in the position that Fritsch locates us as inheritors of Derrida’s work? ‘Persistent and faithful criticism’ - this sounds to me rather like Derrida’s readings of Husserl, Heidegger, Foucault, Levinas, all pursued in the establishing of a strategy that he later applied to particular political problems.
It strikes me that what is required is patience. Reading, commentary, criticism takes a lot of time. This is precisely Fritsch’s point. Time in which the student musters the courage to speak to the master (Derrida says something like this to Foucault at the beginning of his ‘Cogito’.) Youth has time, while in his later years Derrida remarked that he was conscious of there being less and less time. Hence his increasingly urgent political engagements.
Thus there is a rhythm and history to scholarship that one cannot set aside. One mourns all the more when it is interrupted (eg. Merleau-Ponty). And it is developed across many ‘books’. Hopefully the demands of the university, intent on marketing itself and its products, does not distract either Fritsch or Thomson from producing more work in this. In the mean time, I hope to read (note to self: patiently!) their first instalments.
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