1. University of Oregon
Postdeconstructive Necrophilia: Grave Spaces in Aristotle, Augustine, and Blanchot and the
Question of the Decision
Author(s): Floyd Dunphy
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 56, No. 2 (Spring, 2004), pp. 147-167
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2. FLOYD DUNPHY
Postdeconstructive
Necrophilia: Grave Spaces
in Aristotle, Augustine,
andBlanchot and the
Question of the Decision
T HIS
INQUIRY
SEEKSTO TRACE the sight-line from a critique of existential
voluntarism towards a radical analytic of death, where the articulation of the
self is reconfigured in terms of a postdeconstructive subjectivity. Section one
notes the failure of Existentialism's radical self-authentication to say anything
significant and enduring about human subjectivity and draws upon Iris Murdoch
and Martin Heidegger to suggest a place within the following discussion of ethics
for the continuous self and private intention. Section two seeks to outline the
boundaries of the subject, its ghostlydemarcations, and its movement from Dasein
to Mitsein. This movement is analyzed in terms of a sustained meditation upon
death and leads into notions of phenomenological space. This will help us gain
entry into the delicate texture of necrophiliaand will function as the conceptual
framework that we will use to examine the type of subject Derrida is seeking to
establish after Heidegger. Section three applies this conceptual framework to
passages in Aristotle, Augustine, and Blanchot that involve subjectivityand friend-
ship. Section four then examines the structure and content of the decision that
issues from the postdeconstructive subject and follows the decision's migration
outward into the political realm. An example of this outward migration will take
us into a consideration of the "New International"-Derrida and Critchley's glo-
bally deconstructed political community-a consideration that will investigate
the complex reciprocity between ethics and politics and subjectivity as a reinvi-
sioning of a possible humanism, a neohumanism.
1. The Critique of the Essential Subject:The Problem of Existential Voluntarism
Martin Heidegger and Iris Murdoch offer two challenging critiques to Sartrean
Existentialism. In his LetterOn Humanism,Heidegger charges Sartre with merely
inverting the Platonic order of essenceand existence:

3. COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE148
/
Bywayof contrast,Sartreexpressesthe basic tenet of existentialism this way:Existenceprecedes
in
essence. In this statementhe is takingexistentia essentia
and accordingto their metaphysical mean-
ing, which from Plato'stime on has said that essentia
precedes existentia.
Sartrereversesthis state-
ment. But the reversalof a metaphysical statementremainsa metaphysical statement.With it he
stayswithmetaphysics oblivionof the truthof Being. (Basic208)
in
This is the Existentialists' move, a move that, according to Heidegger, kept Sartre
imprisoned within the history of metaphysics. Heidegger's dasein, on the other
hand, as an instantiation of the continuous historical self, suggests a self that is
involved in an ongoing process. "Being-there,"hereness, consciousness folded into
temporality, becomes Heidegger's account of a postmetaphysical selfhood.
Iris Murdoch critiques Sartre's Existentialist move for a different reason-
namely, that it privileges an omnipotent will. In order to resist the Existentialists'
reduction of everything to decisionism, Murdoch suggests instead a subjectivity
that has the continuous ongoing texture of the metaphor of vision. In his view
the Existentialists overemphasize will and action-especially publicly observable
action-and so valorize the individual within the public domain, the world of
ordinary facts.
According to the Existentialists, it is the decision to act that actualizes oneself
in the public sphere: only public decisions count as politics. This approach pro-
hibits the taking up of a contemplative attitude towards an introspective subjec-
tivity; it also delimits the possibilities for self-reflexivity and for all of those
interesting moments that come before the decision. For the Existentialist, "self-
knowledge is something which shows overtly"and is seen only once it is too late:
"Moralityresides at the point of action," at the brink of haste (Murdoch 311).
The self becomes a point of pure will.
For Murdoch, subjectivity (and, following from that, ethics and politics) is not
the will breaking free, authenticating itself in a fleeting public instant. Rather,
approaching subjectivity in relation to the metaphor of vision helps us to resist
utilitarianism and to understand intention as an interior struggle, as an action
that can only be performed privately:
But if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imper-
ceptibly it builds up structures of value round about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial
moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over... But it implies that the exer-
cise of our freedom is a smallpiecemeal businesswhich goes on all the time and not a grandiose
leaping about unimpeded at importantmoments. The moral life, on this view,is something that
goes on continually, somethingthat is switchedoff in betweenthe occurrenceof explicit moral
not
choices. (329)
For Murdoch, the "exercise of freedom" is an activity that takes place sometimes
quietly, sometimes violently, but alwayswithin the deep caverns of interiority where
all of the significant struggles for good and evil take place. This notion of vision,
"of a patient, loving regard, directed upon a person, a thing, a situation," en-
gages the will in an act of sustained attention, rather than unimpeded freedom
(Murdoch 331).
2. Postdeconstructive Subjectivity:Being-Toward Death from Dasein to Mitsein
Derrida and Simon Critchley,spurred on by the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel

4. POSTDECONSTRUCTIVE
NECROPHILIA/
149
Levinas, likewise endeavor to go beyond the Existentialist essentialisms critiqued
by Heidegger and Murdoch by offering up a postdeconstructive subjectivity. But in
their insistence on the political decision-it is in this totality, or not-their post-
deconstructive subjectivity may also finally soften into a postdeconstructive voluntar-
ism. Indeed, it is within the nostalgic traces of existentialism that Critchley and
Derrida and Levinas emerge with some of their most interesting and provocative
insights. It remains to be seen, however, whether the texture of the political deci-
sion-new and singular each time-is enough convincingly to suspend the weight
of the ethical life that emerges within friendship-political or otherwise.
Derrida weaves his discussion of inter-subjectivitywithin the historical fibers of
the ancient texts on friendship. He begins with the vocative attributed to Aristotle
by Montaigne and others: "O my friends, there are no friends!" It is this haunting
maxim that shapes Derrida's thinking on the destablization of "friendship"
throughout his Politics of Friendship. This destabilization becomes a porthole for
the political, and it is through this that we will be transported to the decision of
the political moment.
Following the Levinasian subject, a being who empties itself of its Being,
Derridian friendship begins with a sense of loss. The conditions of possibility for
friendship are to be found in the idea of a de-distanced, dissymmetrical topol-
ogy. Philia begins in survivance.Philia survives to love the inanimate. The beloved
survives in the hopes of being loved in life, as well as in death:
I do not survive the friend, I cannot and must not survive him, except to the extent to which he
already bearsmydeathand inheritsit as the lastsurvivor. bearsmyowndeathand,in a certainway,
He
in
he is the only one to bear it-this properdeath of myselfthus expropriated advance.(Politics
13)
Mourning is the grieved act of possible loving in friendship. It is the mourning
before mourning that is the proper death before death. It is only in full view of
the grave that friendship may begin. The anguish of loss within friendship is
suspended and becomes the radical possibility for the condition of fraternity.The
lover is plunged into anticipated mourning for the beloved: this is the very breath
of friendship, that love may presence itself in the absence of death:
Friendship for the deceased thus carries this philia to the limit of its possibility. But at the same time,
it uncovers the ultimate spring of this possibility: I could not love friendship without projecting its
impetus towards the horizon of this death. (12)
There are two very important things to notice about this statement: first, that
the death is of someone else,and second, that it is a particular death. The death of
the Other,like friendship with the deceased, decenters my own subjectivity and
calls it outward into radical suspension towards the Otherin the grieved act of lov-
ing. This is the meaning of beloved: love someone even past the point of death:
to
"loving belongs only to a being gifted with life or with breath ... being loved, on
the other hand, alwaysremains possible on the side of the inanimate" (12).
That the extreme delimitations of the possibilities of friendship are to be un-
derstood in proximity to the horizon of death in the Otheris a fundamental inver-
sion of Dasein, the Heideggerian subject who can only experience its own death.
For Heidegger, when Dasein experiences death, it experiences the simple move-
ment from the state of "being-there" to "no-longer-being-there." However, be-
cause Dasein is the subjective consciousness of "being-there," it is incapable of

5. COMPARATIVELITERATURE/ 150
experiencing death as a transition from the moment it is "no-longer-being-there."
The very brilliance of Heidegger's fundamental move-Dasein as consciousness
folded into temporality (being there)-delimits Heideggerian subjectivity from
experiencing and understanding what it would mean no longerto behere.It cannot
experience its own death as a transition. This is why the death of others, for
Heidegger, becomes all the more extraordinary, for it is through the analytic of
Mitda-sein that Dasein possesses a being-with-one-another that allows it to gain ac-
cess to an experience of death. Although the experience of death through Mitda-
sein seems, from the outset, a concession that is to some extent commensurable
with the view of Derrida, Levinas, and others, Heidegger also introduces a dis-
tinction that sets his view apart from that of his descendants-the difference
between "being-with" and "being-with-the-dead":
In such being-with with the dead, the deceased himselfis no longer factically "there."However, be-
meansbeing-with-one-another the sameworld.The deceasedhas abandonedour
ing-withalways in
"world"and left it behind. It is in termsof this worldthat those remaining can still be with him. The
more appropriately no-longer-being-there the deceased is graspedphenomenally,the more
the of
clearlyit can be seen that in such being-withwith the dead, the real having-come-to-an-end the
of
deceasedis preciselynotexperienced.Death does revealitself as a loss, but as a loss experienced by
those remainingbehind. However,in sufferingthe loss, the loss of being as such which the dying
person "suffers"does not become accessible. We do not experience the dying of others in a genuine
sense;we are at best alwaysjust
"there" (222)
too.
Implicit in this excerpt from Beingand Timeis the phenomenological difference
between absence and presence. In rough language, the dead are not able to be
with us the way living people are able to be with us-and yet they are still with us.
This is the significance of Heidegger's distinction between Mitda-sein, "being-
with," and "being-with-the-dead."It seems as though we cannot experience the
death of the Otherin the same way that we are able to experience our own deaths.
In the death of the Otherwe do not experience death as a direct loss, but only as
those who remain behind, experiencing the death-loss through proxy. Although
it would appear that our only access to the experience of death is through our
being together with the dead, our necrophilia, our fraternity with the deceased-
or those about to be deceased-does not grant us sufficient purchase on the
death experience: we are at best alwaysjust "there."We are thus caught in a pecu-
liar catch-22 scenario in which Dasein is able to experience neither its own death
nor the death of others in such a way that it may register the impress of its own
mortality in a meaningful fashion. But what is Heidegger driving at when he says
that "every Da-sein must itself actually take dying upon itself. Insofar as it 'is,'
death is always essentially my own?" (Being 223), or that "in dying, it becomes
evident that death is ontologically constituted by mineness and existence?" (223).
Perhaps his next statement will serve as a clue: "Dying is not an event, but a
phenomenon to be understood existentially" (223).
If "being-there"requires the consciousness of a Dasein, a subjective presence,
then "no-longer-being-there" can only be experienced by the one who was first
conscious of "being-there."Thus, Heidegger can say that death is always essen-
tially my own. Death in this sense finds our subjectivity heavily weighted with our
own eventual finitude. Viewed properly, the Heideggerian concept of death is
our being-toward finitude. It is a fundamental posture that we take in the face
this

6. POSTDECONSTRUCTIVE NECROPHILIA/151
of our own mortality knowing that what it means to be human, to be conscious of
being here, will one day end: it is the last and most significant thing that we will
do without knowing it.
But does this preoccupation with temporal consciousness- being-there--hint
of the leftover traces of the modern subject? Is Heidegger's painting a palimp-
sest, the residual image of a Cartesian ego emerging through the thickly tex-
tured existential analytic of Heidegger's Dasein? From this perspective, death
becomes an ontology, a totality that tries to take in the whole scope and horizon
of death. This is the death universal, and Heidegger's analysis becomes a meta-
physics of death, albeit abundantly nuanced.
According to Simon Critchley, there has always been a strained idiosyncratic
fissure interrupting the flow of Heidegger's (and I hesitate to use the word)
logic. "Ifone were to push this claim a little further, one might say that there is a
straightforward incoherence, in Heidegger's Being and Time,between the analy-
sis of Mitsein in Division I and the determination of Mitsein as das Volk Division
in
II" (247). This is the abstruse tension between Dasein and Mitsein. Everything
that Heidegger tries to accomplish in disclosureseems to be best served in the
middle of the contextual particularities of everydayness, but it seems as though
Heidegger still suffers from a modern Cartesian complex: an utter flight from
the sensibilities of things, back into ontology and, reluctantly, the pre-imminent
cogito.' For Critchley this is the disturbing pathos of Heidegger's authenticity
that so desperately needs to be avoided. In his view:
the genuine philosophical radicality of Being and Timelies in the existential analytic of inauthenticity.
Whathas to be recoveredfrom the wreckageof Heidegger'spoliticalcommitmentis his phenom-
enology of everyday life, the sheer banality of our contact (cotoiment)
with the world and with others.
(240)
Being and Time must be rewritten from the perspective of the inauthenticity of
the Mitsein-analyticand reconfigured as a social ontology. Saying we, the us that
we are, is a recognition that the existential analytic of Dasein was too limiting a
project. What is needed instead is a broadening of our gaze outward to allow for
our social being to emerge, and, having done so, to announce the death of meta-
physics as a privileged science.
But this realization does not mean that we need abandon Heidegger altogether.
Heidegger remains ready-at-hand, armed with all of the conceptual tools to suffi-
ciently rearticulate this new position. There is no going beyond Heidegger un-
less we go forward with him. To overcome him will mean that he will always be
our companion.2
' "The senses do not enable us to know any being in its being; they merely make known the
usefulnessand harmfulnessof 'external'inner worldlythings for human beings encumberedwith
bodies..,. they tell us nothing at all about beings in their being" (Heidegger, Being 90). Heidegger's
commentary on his analysis of Descartes' contempt for sensibility is ironic, however, because subjec-
tivity, for Heidegger, is a matter to be thought within the structure of Dasein. This is the very thing
that Levinas and Derrida will define themselves against. For them, subjectivity (or more to the
point: ethics as first philosophy) begins with the sensation in the face of the Other.
Against Heidegger,
theface is not a matter to be thought at all; it is not an object of our understanding. Rather, we
apprehend the Otherin proximity.
2 "Myview, broadly stated, is that the ambiguity of thinking the subject after Heidegger must be
governed by the double bind of a double affirmation: firstly, by the need-ethically, politically,

7. COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE152
/
For Heidegger, Dasein always encounters others and other things (things ex-
tended)3 from within the given world, things that are "athand." Being in is always
a beingwith (Being 112). As Dasein surfaces to its own awareness through Mitsein
-worldness-it does so through the phenomenology of care, that is, "in terms of
a totality of the interconnected places of the context of useful things at hand in
the surrounding world" (Being 95). Heideggerian subjectivity goes from "being
there" to "being with" to belongingthere.The positional belonging of beings and
things is gathered into the nearness of a region.This is what constitutes Heidegger's
notion of aroundness,which is "the being around us of beings encountered ini-
tially in the surrounding world," "the spatiality of what is at hand" (Being 96).
These everyday associations,the spatiality of what is at hand, are not "catalogued
by the observational measurement of space"; rather, they are apprehended in
their giveness through a taking care of things (Being 96). It is through this mode of
discovery that Dasein, by being-in-the-world,
encounters the regional spatiality of
things-at-hand. This, in turn, could be said to describe the primordial nature
of disclosure:
Space, which is discovered in circumspect being-in-the-world as the spatiality of a totality of useful
things, belongs to beings themselves as their place ... But this spatiality has its own unity by virtue
of the worldlike totality of relevance of what is spatially at hand. The "surrounding world" does not
arrange itself in a previously given space, but rather its specific worldliness articulates in its signifi-
cance the relevant context of an actual totality of places circumspectly referred to each other. The
actual world discovers the spatiality of space belonging to it. The fact that what is at hand can be
encountered in its space of the surrounding world is ontically possible only because Da-sein itself is
"spatial"with regard to its being-in-the-world. (Being96-97)
Implicit within this notion of spatiality is the concept of de-distancing,which
removes the alienation of space and time that exists between corporeal beings
and objects:
De-distancing means making distance disappear, making the being at a distance of something dis-
appear, bringing it near. Dasein is essentially de-distancing. As the being that it is, it lets beings be
encountered in nearness ... De-distancing ... must be kept in mind as an existential. (Being97)
This de-distancing for the most part, a bringingnear, and it is the essential ten-
is,
dencies of Mitsein that gather things together in the overcoming of distance.
Remoteness or nearness should not be understood in terms of objective distance,
but as powers and capabilities of human subjectivity.That is why the presence of
an absent lover can seem closer to us than the very object that we hold in our
own hand:
On those paths Dasein does not traverse, like an objectively present corporeal thing, a stretch of
space, it does not "eat up kilometres"; nearing and de-distancing are always a heedful being toward
what is approached and de-distanced. An "objectively" long path can be shorter than an "objec-
metaphysically---to leave the climate of Heidegger's thinking; and secondly, by the conviction that we
cannot leave it for a philosophy that would be pre-Heideggerian. That is, there is no going back behind
Heidegger and no going forward without him; the break or paradigm shift occasioned by Sein und
Zeit is, in my view, philosophically decisive" (Critchley 62). Critchley will likewise divide L~vinas's
Zionism from his ethical thought, thereby removing the primary thrust from Levinas's writings.
3 In one sense, we have never left behind Descartes, who articulated the ontological difference
between self and world that led to epistemology, the logic of positivism, the linguistic turn, herme-
neutics, and, most recently, the ethical turn. Whatever new reconfigurations of subjectivity we artic-
ulate, we will alwaysfeel the ebbs and flows of consonance and dissonance between self and world.

8. POSTDECONSTRUCTIVE NECROPHILIA/153
muchshorterpathwhichis perhapsan "onerous
tively" one"and strikes as infinitely
one long ... The
objective distances of objectively present things do not co-incide with the remoteness and nearness
of whatis at hand in the world.(Being99)
On Heidegger's account it is clear that de-distancingoperates as a principle of
phenomenology,4 and in order for it to be understood in meaningful ways it must
be approached existentially through the phenomenon of care.For Heidegger care
is the only "logic" (or "anti-logic")that can account for the relational ontology of
Mitsein,and it will prove to be indispensable in our coming to an understanding
The circumspect de-distancing of everyday Da-sein discovers the
of life together.
being-in-itself of the "true"world, of beings with which Da-sein as existing is al-
ways already together (Being 99, italics mine).
Taking care, then, creates the conditions of possibilities for an encounter with
the Other."The other is encountered in his Mitda-Sein in the world" (Being 113).
Moreover, the ongoing texture of carecontours the subjectivity of Dasein to the
point where "being-with-others belongs to the being of Dasein" (Being 115). In
this, we are beginning to see the first traces of a (post) deconstructive subjectiv-
ity, although one would be hard pressed to prove that Heidegger understood the
full import of all of the nuances of his own thinking. In words Levinas would
later use, this is the inaugural appearance of the conception of the demand of
the Otherresiding in me. In Heidegger's own words, "Asbeing-with, Dasein 'is'
essentially for the sake of others" (Being 116).
Butjust as we seem to have touched the hem of a postdeconstructive subjectiv-
ity in Heidegger, the whole thing begins to unravel-and unravel quickly. The
unraveling starts with a disturbing comment that Heidegger makes after having
just established that Dasein is "essentiallyfor the other": "Butwhen actual, factical
Dasein does not turn to others and thinks that it does not need them, or misses
them, it is in the mode of being-with" (Being 112, italics mine). The fibrous con-
nection with the Otherproves threadbare. What previously appeared to be the
continuous ongoing texture of worldis coming apart at the seams:
This phenomenon, which is none too happily designated as "empathy," then supposed, as it were,
is
to provide the first ontological bridge from one's own subject, initially given by itself, to the other
subject, which is initially quite inaccessible... it remains puzzling how the relation of Dasein to
itself is to disclose the other as other. (Being 117)
What we are witnessing is a Cartesian flight from the world into the security of
the cogito. For Heidegger, everydayness loses traction and fades away into the
publicness of the they.This is a form of forgetfulness and, as such, qualifies as a
form of inauthenticity.The impending trauma of intersubjectivity proved to be
too great for Heidegger, and, rather than embrace the decentering that needed
to take place in order for subjectivity to be released from the insular constric-
tions of Dasein, Heidegger collapsed back into the familiar isolation of Dasein,
and with this decisive move remains within a history of subjectivity that is closer
to Descartes than it is to L~vinas.5
4 Let us remember Heidegger's definition of phenomenon:"Phenomenon-the self-showing in it-
self-means a distinctive way something can be encountered" (Being 27).
SI am being deliberately provocative here in order to establish the view that Levinas needs to be
seen as making a significant break from Heidegger, and, as such, does not define his task as solving
the problem of self and world.

9. COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE154
/
There remains, however, one possible opening onto the infinite in Heidegger's
thought that will smooth our transmigration into Derrida's thinking, a statement
that creates the preconditions for a togetherness-a togetherness can reach into
that
the beyond-a togetherness that embraces the impending finitude of the grave
and yet is still a denial of death: "Being-with existentially determines Da-sein
even when an other is not factically present and perceived... This being-with
and the facticity of being-with-one-another are not based on the fact that several
'subjects' are physically there together" (Being 113). To access the richness of this
statement, we must read it in the inverse. My being-with-one-anothernot in terms
is
of this world, but it is in terms of another world, a world where the dead live on
to be loved by us-an us who still occupy this world, the world of Heidegger's
everydayness. There is an absence that exhibits such density that, like a black
hole, it sucks us into a death-world where the deceased may once again com-
mune with us and be-loved. What Heidegger condemned as inauthentic,Derrida
celebrates in luxurious morbid jubilation. Derrida's togetherness, unlike Heideg-
ger's, is a necro-philia, friendship with the dead, a vital synergy with the grave
a
that demands a new estimation of subjectivity that will go beyond Heidegger's
Dasein. The space in which friendship issues is a presencing, an ecstasy, that
collapses the vast geography of space and time into this otherworld-into the
space of memory. The infusion of space and time into memory creates a world-
space for an intersubjective opening onto the infinite. The breach between the
world of the living and of the dead is held, through the dialect of memory, in
tension. Until we are willing to linger in this middle space, we are not yet ready to
understand what Heidegger should have meant by Mitsein or what Derrida is
now seeking in his new determination of the subject.
3. Necrophilia:Aristotle, Augustine, and Blanchot
Friendship stretches out toward the future-and the past. Friendship begins
by one friend recalling another in proximity, temporality, and memory-even
from beyond the grave: "Friendshipbegins by surviving ... it is because of Friend-
ship that the dead live ... the condition of possibility for friendship is memory.
The dead live because they are recalled by friends, they survive after death be-
cause they are not forgotten. In this sense, philia, is necro-philia"(Critchley 257-
58). This precondition of memoria now reorient our thinking towards a certain
will
fraternal conjuration: invocation of the dead. For Derrida, this fraternalizationis
an
constructed, not only spatially (from different places), but also temporally (from
different times). Derrida characterizes this summoning of the dead in terms of
the responsibility of the other residing in us:
But this responsibility can be called for only by first of all summoning the dead. They are, after a
fashion, made to be bornagain; they are convoked in an invocation, once again, of their birth. The
oath of this co-engagement thus resembles of fraternal conjuration. (Politics 94)
Here, I will summon across time and place three friends, who will provide us with a
meditation on death and friendship. I will begin with Aristotle, who must traverse
the greatest distance to presence himself with us: "In the development devoted to

10. POSTDECONSTRUCTIVE
NECROPHILIA/155
this inequality Aristotle evokes friendship with the dead, [even though now he him-
self is dead-the dead invoking the dead through memory?] a friendship which
knows without being known... Hence one must not ask to be loved in return
... or to be loved in like measure to one's own love" (Derrida, Politics 206-207).
Loving the dead in friendship, for Aristotle, occurs in an incongruous fashion.
This incongruous dissymmetry first takes place in the vocative attributed to
Aristotle, O myfriends, there are nofriends!-a vocative that presupposes a "saying"
and an "unsaying."Aristotle utters a vocative to be heard by friends, even as he
laments thereare nofriends. Because of this, Derrida assigns Aristotle to a herme-
neutics of suspicion, one that destabilizes understanding into misunderstanding:
Aristotle-let us call him by that name-at least asked the other to hear him, understand him, to be
enough of a friend to do so, and therefore to, consider him-Aristotle-as a friend, qua the friend
of a promise of friendship? And even at the very moment of saying "no friend"? This request for
friendship, this offer of friendship, this call to coming together in friendship, at least to hear, the
timeit takesto hear,at least to finally agree,the time it takes to agree on the meaning of the sentence,
even if it were still saying, in the saying of its said, the worst in dialectics, is this, this saying of the
said, not, then, the "Ilove you listen" of the "Ilove you; do you hear me?" (Politics 217, italics mine)
Derrida's view is that the text before him is fraught with fissures that, if agitated,
will begin to deconstruct text and meaning through the process of contradic-
tion. With Derrida, a more delicate approach is alwaysin order, one that appreci-
ates the delicate tensions of irony:
But we cannot, and we must not, exclude the fact that when someone is speaking, in private or in
public, when someone teaches, publishes, preaches, orders, promises, prophesies, informs or com-
municates, some force in him or her is also striving not to be understood, approved, accepted in
consensus-not immediately, not fully, and therefore not in the immediacy and plenitude of tomor-
row. (Politics 218)
Hidden somewhere in the echoes of Aristotle's vocative is the desire for misun-
derstanding: Aristotle is striving not to be understood even as he pleads with us to
listen. With great deconstructive energy, Aristotle's vocative displays a textual
incongruence that is provocative and that demands that we remain with its dia-
lectical tensions for awhile in the hopes of understanding (a virtue usually con-
nected with the hermeneutics of trust); by doing so, we have ventured into a
friendship with the one who has uttered that there are no friends.
In his Nichomachean EthicsAristotle likewise discloses the abiding commitments
that he holds with regard to the notion of subjectivity within friendship by
problematizing the notion of wishing the greatest good for one's friend:
This raises the question whether or not we wish our friends the greatest of all goods, namely, to be
gods. For (if that wish were fulfilled,) they would no longer be our friends, and, since friends are
something good, we would have lost this good. Accordingly, if our assertion is correct that a man
wishes his friend's good for his friend's sake, the friend would have to remain the man he was.
Consequently, one will wish the greatest good for his friend as a human being, but perhaps not all
the greatest goods, for each man wishes for his own good most of all. (1 159a 5-10)
Here, Aristotle, with philosophical precision, identifies a core difference within
friendship: the demarcation between human and divine good. Because he is in-
tensely interested in what it would mean to be human within the category of
friendship, Aristotle leaves behind all fascination with the divine. Furthermore,
because all thinking on friendship must stay within the realm of the possible, we
must also remain within the domain of biology, and it is here that Derrida, pick-

11. COMPARATIVE
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ing up on Aristotle's ironic lyric, locates the central tension within this passage:
Perfect friendship destroys itself. It is contradictory in its very essence. On the one hand, in effect, one
mustwantthe greatestgood for the friend-hence one wantshim to become a god. But one cannot
wantthat,one cannotwantwhatwouldthen be wantedfor at leastthree reasons.(Politics
222)
First, friendship with a god would not be possible due to a remoteness that would
exhaust the possibilities for friendship:
Theenergy draws force presence fromproximity. absenceand remotenessdo not
offriendship its from or If
destroyfriendship,theyattenuateor exhaustit, theyenervateit. The proverbon this subjectquoted
byAristotleindeed makesthe point thatfor him, absenceor remotenessis synonymous withsilence:
friendsare separatedwhen theycannot speakto one another.(Politics 222)
It is at this point that we are able to diagnose a cardinal distinction between
Aristotle and Derrida, between more classical configurations of friendship and
Derrida's necrophilia. Aristotle stayswith the more conventional configurations of
friendship, while Derrida, not bound by such overt constraints of the sentient,
moves into the poetic mysteries of necrophilia. For Aristotle, "friendship can still
remain even when much is taken away,but when one partner is quite separated
from the other, as in the case of divinity, it can remain no longer" (1 159a 25). For
Derrida, the physical absence of a friend-in another place, or even in death-
does not stop the beloved from presencing himself in a type of de-distanced
proximity: the miracle of memory that raises the dead (or gods) to life.
Second, in Derrida's reading of Aristotle we are prohibited from violating the
natural order; namely, we must love the Otheras they naturally are in their hu-
man nature. Friendship is a distinctive feature of human finitude, and, as such,
the deification of a man lies outside the purview of this kind of relationship.
Third, the gods have no need of friendship. The self-sufficiency of a deity-
albeit in terms of absolute being or knowledge-has no need to go outside of
itself. In contrast, philia demands that thought go outside of itself: this is why
human friendship, as a finite fraternity, is friendship par excellence. The gaze of
friendship is continually directed towards the finitude of the Other. Thus, Aristotle
confirms the following:
Friendship is present to the extent that men share something in common, for that is also the extent
to which they share a view of what is just. And the proverb "friends hold in common what they have"
is correct,for friendshipconsistsin community.(1159a25)
Indeed, philia, in its originary Greek construction, was thought to constitute a
bond that held the members of any association together, whether that associa-
This idea of philia,
tion be natural or conventional: it was primarily inter-subjective.
the idea of having something in common, approaches the conception of concord.
The proximity of these two notions likely underlies the Homeric adage when two
go together, more alluringly, Derrida's fragmented saying, "He who accompa-
or,
nies me" (see, especially, Politics 171-93).
This deconstructed fraternity-this inspirited philia-is characterized by a soli-
darity that is achieved in soul-sharing.In keeping with ghosts and their texts,
Derrida, in an obscure footnote, quotes a passage from the Eudemian Ethics(7.1240b
2-15), a ghostlike text whose authorship has often been questioned:
Further, sayaboutfriendshipsuch thingsas thatfriendshipis equality,
we and true friendshavebut
a single soul. All such phrasespoint back to the single individual; a man wishesgood to himself
for
in this fashion. [. . .] And wishing the existence above all of the friend, living with him, sharing his

12. POSTDECONSTRUCTIVE NECROPHILIA/157
joy and his grief, unity of soul with the friend, the impossibility of even living without one another,
and the dyingtogetherare characteristic a singleindividual.(Politics 5 190)
of n
This speaks to us of a life together
that, through phenomenology, witnesses the
compression of two souls into the space of one. True friends, then, have but a
single soul, and it is by dwelling in this intersubjective space that the shared
dynamics of joy, grief, and a life together become possible. But this inevitably
leads to the problem of locating the exact place of subjectivity.In Derrida's words,
"Buthow is this topology of habitat in friendship to be thought? 'What is a friend?'
Response: 'one soul in twin bodies"' (Politics177). If we agree with Derrida and
Aristotle on this provisional, if not historical, definition of intersubjectivity, then
we find that the dispossession that surfaces to consciousness within this configu-
ration of intersubjectivity succumbs to an uncanny unhomeliness:
A friend, havingmore than one place [twinbodies], wouldneverhavea place of his own. He could
never count on the sleep or nourishmentof the economic intimacyof some "home." body of
The
the friend, his body proper,could always become the body of the other. This other body could live
in his body proper like a guest, a visitor,a traveler,a temporaryoccupant, Friendshipwould be
unheimlich.How would unheimlich, uncanny, translate into Greek? Why not translate it by atopos:
outside of all place or placeless,without familyor familiarity,
outside of self, expatriate,extra[-]
ordinary,extravagant, absurdor mad,weird,unsuitable, strange,but also "astranger (Politics
to." 178)
With this unhomeliness comes the demand that the subject reside outside of itself.
Outside of allplace. Unsuitable. We are always in the place of the Other,and, as such,
feel the impending demand that we must always move within a dialectics of hos-
pitality. I am outsideof myselfWe are alwaysa guest, or we are alwaysencountering
a guest. This is the fundamental posturing that will contour Derrida's postdecon-
structive(inter) subjectivity. host, and we are hosted-our place is always the
We
place of the Other.We never feel at home when we are at home-like coming
home as an adult after many years away.This is likewise the meaning of Levinas's
being that empties itself of its Being.
With Derrida, then, singularity is displaced into duplicity. the one soul half-
twinned into two bodies. This absolute intercommunity of souls problematizes
the impending separation that death will enact. The promise of finitude is the
promise of a tear,of one soul being ripped in half, resulting in a death trauma, the
act of death,for both lover and beloved.
Augustine knew something of the trauma of this half-souled separation, and it
is here that we will pause to consider a meditation of Book 4 of the Confessions.
Augustine crosses the folds of history to presence himself, inviting us into his
economy of tears for a departed friend. Augustine is seized by what Derrida glosses
as a double horror,
That of survivingand not surviving,of survivingwith half his soul amputated-the ineluctable
arithmeticalconsequenceof the Aristotelianaxiom-but alsothatof not surviving, is, of perhaps
that
(forte)not keepingwithinhimself,in whatis left of self, at leasta little of the beloved. (Politics
186)
This double terror leads Augustine to a haunting question: Do we survive for
ourselves or for the Otherin us? The union of friendship, especially after death, is
a necro-magnetism pulls us into the still warm grave of the friend: it pulls us
that
towards the other half of ourselves. We enter a fraternity with the grave, and we
covenant with the inevitable destiny of rejoining our friend, and ourselves.Augus-
tine, steeped in the deep interiority of a half-souled suspension, pauses and re-

13. COMPARATIVE
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calls (re-members) us his act of mourning:
for
But there had sprung up in me some kind of feeling, too, contrary to this, for both exceedingly
wearisome was it to me to live and dreadful to die. I suppose, the more I loved him, so much the
more did I hate and fear, as a most cruel enemy, that death which had robbed me of him ... For I
was astonished that other mortals lived, since he whom I loved, as if he would never die, was dead;
and I wondered still more that I, who was to him a second self, could live when he was dead. Well did
one say of his friend, "Thou half of my soul," for I felt that my soul and his soul were but one soul in
two bodies; and, consequently, my life was a horror to me, because I would not live in half. And
therefore, perchance, was I afraid to die, lest he should die wholly whom I had so greatly loved.
(4.6.11)
I would not live in half Torn asunder. Divided. Augustine enters into an abyssal
calculation: does he survive for himself or for the one for whom he is in mourn-
ing. The asymmetrical density of this decision weighs heavily upon Augustine:
"for self or for the other, for the other in self, in a narcissism which is never
related to itself except in the mourning of the other.., the other's survival in
self" (Derrida, Politics187). The Othersurvives in me through an absence. This is
the unalterable asymmetry that calls me into a continual stream of questioning.
This, for Augustine, is the "relation of friendship to originary finitude and the
question of sur-vivance"(Critchley 270). Perhaps this is what Augustine is trying
to articulate a little later when he says that "sweetness turned into bitterness, and
upon the loss of the life of the dying, the death of the living" (4.9.14), or, in
Derrida's words, "This is why we mourn their death ... and life becomes a living
death because a friend is lost" (Politics187).
But in the midst of this loss, there is an advent; there is a comingof the Other.It
begins in a speaking to the one who is no longer here. This address, this speaking
-a hospitality for the dead-welcomes the Otherto be present for me. Derrida
continues:
I presupposehis presence, if only at the end of my sentence, on the other end of the line, .... at the
intentional pole of my allocution ... But in another respect, my very sentence simultaneously puts
him at a distance or retards his arrival, since it must always ask or presuppose the question "areyou
there?" (Politics173)
In this instance, although the address objectifies the Other, appeal to a presence
the
nonetheless invokes his advent. The Otheris made to come, to be welcomed, so
that his orphan soul may rejoin, if only for an instant, the living part of him in
whomhe survives. But this appeal to the Other,this hospitality of the dead, is a
gesture yet to come,in an ad-vent, an appearing. Consistent with Derrida's herme-
neutic of suspicion is the conception that within every advent is a deference,
which clears a space for Derrida'ssecularized eschaton of a democracy alwaysyet to
come. This is the fundamental undoing that accompanies every facet of Derrida's
thought (see Politics 174). With this move, Derrida takes flight from the particu-
lar intimacies of a necro-memoria the abstract fascinations of deconstruction.
into
In one fell swoop, we have moved from the highly personalized localities of the
dead Otherto a globally deconstructed eschatological politics, from the messi-
ness of finding intersubjectivity in the death of the Otherto a metaphysics of the
political eschaton. It is in this vein that Derrida still appeals to a Nietzschean
futurity-indeed, perhaps to a syncretism between Neitszche and a deconstructed
Judaic eschatology-of a democratization to come in a series of eternal returns.

14. POSTDECONSTRUCTIVE NECROPHILIA/159
We will more fully entertain the possible connections between a Nietzschean
nihilism and a deconstructedJudaic repossession of the land, after the death of
God, when we consider the particularities of the decision,and of the decision's
migration outward into the public realm in terms of the "New International."
But we must first turn from Derrida's metaphysic to The Instant of My Death,
Blanchot's three-page meditation, which inspired a short philosophical novella
on the part of Derrida. There is a mirroring effect that occurs between Blanchot's
short meditation on death and the passivityof the decision that Levinas, Derrida,
and Critchley want more fully to articulate. The texture of the decision, and this
is the quandary that Augustine faced, will take us into the hiatus of a delayed
contingency: "One thus finds oneself in a fatal and double impossibility: the im-
possibility of deciding, but the impossibility of remaining [demeurer] the unde-
in
cidable" (Derrida, Demeure16). For Augustine, it is the decision as to Whois to
survive, for Blanchot it is the question Why Me?
There remained,however, the momentwhen the shootingwasno longer but to come, the feeling
at
of lightness that I would not know how to translate: freed from life? The infinite opening up? Nei-
ther happiness, nor unhappiness.Nor the absence of fear and perhaps already thestepbeyond. I
know,I imagine that this unanalyzable feeling changedwhat there remainedfor him of existence.
As if the death outside of him could only hence forth collide with the death in him. "Iam alive."
"No,you are dead." (9)
For Blanchot the step beyond betrays to us the ultimate texture of the instant
of death: an instant that is always coming and yet never comes. This can be artic-
ulated as a posturing before our finitude, and even greater than that, before our
impending graveside. To dwell in the instant of death is to escape from the vul-
gar conception of time that Heidegger spurned. The measure of time fades away
and is reabsorbed into the phenomenology of the moment. 'All that remains is
the feeling of lightness that is death itself or, to put it more precisely, the instant
of my death henceforth alwaysin abeyance" (Blanchot 11). Derrida glosses thus:
I am dead, or I will be dead in an instant, or an instant ago I was going to be dead. Someone intends
to speak, to speak to us, not only of his death, but of his death in the sense of the Latin, de, in the
sense of from his death ... from my death, from the place and from the taking place, better yet, from
the having-taken-place, already of my death. (Demeure 45)
We must not think of the instant in terms of the measurement of time. The instant,
rather, is a way of being before a trauma, a tragedy, or even more profoundly,
death. The instant possesses an immemorial elasticity that defies quantitative
diagnosis.
With Blanchot, there is a remembering-of a young man perhaps-and the
infinite density of a moment. The Germans (vanquished Visigoths) were retreat-
ing homeward away from the pursuing Allies. A knock ushers in an instant, an
indescribable duration, which would warp time and place into a spinning vortex.
One man, in a family of women, proceeds, almost priest-like, to take his place
before the firing squad. His pace, increments of half-lives, a denial of his execu-
tion, is a vindication of his innocence. Men are shouting (in French, German,
Russian?). In the midst of this immeasurable density, he experiences "a light-
ness, a sort of beatitude" (5): the death of death? I am already dead, therefore I
am immortal. Hence, he is bound to death in an inescapable friendship. Butjust
"at that instant, an abrupt return to the world" (5): comrades appear on the

15. COMPARATIVE
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horizon-on the horizon of death-to deliver the young man. The firing squad
stands, frozen in formation, "prepared to remain, thus in an immobility that
arrested time" (5). Next, in a fleeting moment the young man was dismissed and
released from his covenant with death. He moved, with a sense of lightness, and
fled to a distant forest where he regained a sense of the real. He moved within
the space of a surreal imaging, a movement extended, as he sat, absorbing the
magnitude of what had just taken place. He lingers now, in death, before death,
indeed, on the other side of death.
A substitution has occurred, but not the one that the young man has thought:
"Three young men, sons of farmers ... had been slaughtered" (7). The termina-
tion of the instant is followed by an impenetrable question: Whyme?Released
from death only to embrace death more fully. Whyme?The illogic of tragedy:
"Strangersto all combat whose only fault was their youth" (7). And now the recon-
ciliation-life on the other side of the instant. Someinstants can last a wholelife-
time: Why me? What follows is the torment of a mis-placed injustice: "There
remained, however, at the moment when the shooting was no longer to come,
the feeling of lightness that I would not know how to translate: freedom from
life? The infinite opening up?" (7).
This is the other side, the infinite opening up, freed from life to embrace
death. His confession, like his existence, is mixed, confused. "Iam alive. No, you
are dead" (9). He is living a borrowed life, a haunted life, a life no longer his-
he lingers in a debt he could never pay. The demandof the Otherin me. He relin-
quishes his right to subjectivity and enters an infinite deference: The Otherin me.
He now lives to find himself in others-dwelling in an intersubjectivity:"All that
remains is the feeling of lightness that is death itself, or, to put it more precisely,
the instant of my death, alwaysin abeyance" (11).
All of the most fundamental insights of this narrative are imploded into the
moment of the decisionthat experiences an eternal deference. To understand
this more vividly,we must enter the central labyrinthine confusion of the instant
whereby a great exchange takes place: three young men's lives for Blanchot's. "I
am alive, No you are dead." The unexpected substitution fractures our subjectiv-
ity.6I am living a borrowed This is the theater of the decision. Dreamlike and
life.
surreal, the infinity of the Othercomes upon us and we enter into play, always
deferred, infinitely perfectible. The decision does not originate within us, but
rather circumvents our own subjectivity.It apprehends us in utter astonishment,
takes us hostage, and invites us into an eternal hospitality that contours all of the
significant structures of our subjectivity. There is no surviving on the other side
of the instant: modern subjectivity expires. The decision is an indescribable mag-
nitude: it almost requires everything of us and then lets us off the hook to live in
6 Our subjectivity becomes a split infinitive, a divided subjectivity. I am two witnesses. I am only
half myselfand my subjectivity delayed:"Oneof the two saysto the other, 'I am alive,'and would
is
thus be the one who has survived. But it is the other, the one who has survived, who responds to
him: 'No you are dead.'And this is the colloquium,this is the dialoguebetweentwowitnesses,who
are, moreover[audemeurant], same, aliveand dead, living-dead,and both of whom in abidance
the
[endemourance] claimor allege thatone is alive,the other dead, as if life went only to an I and death
to a you"(Derrida,Politics97). We experience our being-toward-death fissure that opens us up
as a
onto the infinity of the Other.

16. POSTDECONSTRUCTIVE
NECROPHILIA/161
the vacuum of an insatiable hospitality. We now look for ourselves in others and
others within ourselves. But this decision is also accompanied with an impend-
ing sense of injustice that obligates us to the alterity within us:
The decision is not something taken by a subject, but rather the subject (insofar as one can still
employ this word post-deconstructively) is taken by the decisionthat is made without its volition. In
this sense, the moment of the decision is the subject's relation to an alterity within itself, something
which corresponds to the structure of the Lbvinasian subject. (Critchley 263)
4. The Nature of the Decision and the New International
In an unpublished lecture delivered at Green College in Vancouver, British
Columbia, on 11 April, 2000, Simon Critchley suggested that the way ahead for
conceiving of an ethical self was a postdeconstructive echoing Levinas's
subjectivity,
formulation of substitutionas the phenomenological thrust "tofound ethical sub-
jectivity in sensibility and to describe sensibility as a proximity to the other, a
proximity whose basis is found in what Levinas calls substitution." In Ethics,Poli-
Critchley describes substitution as "the deep structure of subjec-
tics, Subjectivity,
tive experience... structured in a relation of responsibility or responsivity to
the other" (64). Ethics, in this way, is a moment of self-negation, borne out of a
desire for the other that can in no way be reduced to a recovery of the self (65).
Speaking more specifically to the question of a postdeconstructive subjectivity,
Critchley cites Jacques Derrida as the first to use the term "postdeconstructive"
to describe new determinations of subjectivity that must come only after feelings
of duty. Critchley's thesis in his book thus becomes clear: "Myclaim here is that
the Levinasian account of subjectivity as responsibility to the other provides the
framework for the kind of new determination of the 'subject' by Derrida" (71).
Thus, a postdeconstructive subjectivity moves beyond the self's autonomous
grounding as a self to Levinas's formulation of the self as a substitution towards
the responsibility of the Other.
On Levinas's account, it is the theological notion of expiation that provides
possibilities for thinking about this new determination of subjectivity.Levinas de-
theologizes the origin and content of expiation while allowing the general im-
port of the word to remain and inform the richness of his thought. Speaking of
the origins of this word expiation, Levinas problematizes the two streams of
confluence that flow together to provide this word with its robust magnitude:
On the one hand, the problem of the Man-God includes the idea of a self-inflicted humiliation on
the part of the Supreme Being, of a descent of the Creator to the level of the Creature; that is to say,
an absorption of the most active activity into the most passive passivity. On the other hand the
problem includes, as if brought about by this passivity pushed to its ultimate degree in the Passion,
the idea of expiation for others, that is, of a substitution. The identical par excellence, the
noninterchangeable, the unique par excellence, would be substitution itself. (EntreNous53-54)
More than a new determination of the subject, this construal of substitution
emerges as almost a complete denial of the subject by suggesting that the self is
perpetually suspended toward the Otherin an ongoing self-negation. The sense
that we have of ourselves, and this is the lie of the Enlightenment, is really the
demand of the Otherresiding within us, calling us outside of ourselves:

17. COMPARATIVELITERATURE/ 162
The passivedecision, condition of the event, is always me, structurally, other decision, a ren-
in an
dering decision as the decision of the other. Of the absolutelyother in me, of the other as the
absolutewho decidesof me in me. (Critchley 263)
The only possible critique of this position, following Iris Murdoch, is that
Critchley's point is truer than he (or Derrida) could ever have imagined: when
the "crisis"finally arrives the businessof decidingis mostlyover.Why is this? Because
the texture of the ethical life features an ongoing registry, almost unnoticeable,
where smaller, insignificant decisions build up into the higher emergences of
the ethical life; the moral life is a web of existential affirmations that are spun
together to form a nonintentional consciousness. Murdoch's private intention is
really a Levinasian non-intention.
But if this designation of self seems to annihilate subjectivitycompletely, L6vinas
reminds us that it was the anti-essentialism of modernism that cleared a space for
the self-emptying subject:
Modernantihumanism, denyingthe primacyof the person, an end in itself,in being, consequently
seeking that meaning in a pure and simple configurationof elements, may have left a place for
subjectivity substitution. is not that the self isjust a being endowedwith certainqualitiescalled
as It
moral,whichit wouldbearas attributes. is the infinitepassivity passionor patience of the me-
It or
its self-the exceptional uniquenessto which it is reduced that is that incessantevent of substitu-
Nous59)
tion, the factfor being of emptyingitselfof its being. (Entre
It is within this vacuum that Levinas suggests a reconstruction of subjectivity that
resides in the demand of the Other. Thus, when considering Heidegger's notion
of Dasein, Levinas asks whether "the Da of my Dasein is not already the usurpa-
tion of someone's place?" (EntreNous 148). We are not even at home in our own
place, our own being;the Da of our Dasein may prove to be, on Levinas's account,
the high-jacked subjectivityof someone else. And so the inevitable question: what
justifies my occupying myplace, this place, as a self? Why Me?
Just as Heidegger turned Descartes' fundamental maxim against him,7 so
Levinas turns Heidegger's Dasein into a question, indeed, a questioning."Dasein
in Heidegger is never hungry" (Totality134), Levinas argues, because Dasein is
not human enough to feel its own impinging presence in the place of the Other,
and the Heideggerian subject dis-places (usurps) the position of the Other.For
L6vinas, our relation to the Other,like our relation to the world, is not ontologi-
cal: "Position, absolutely without transcendence, does not resemble the compre-
hension of the world by the Heideggerian Da. It is not a care for Being, nor a
relation with existents, nor even a negation of the world, but its accessibility in
enjoyment" (Totality138). "Enjoyment":' L6vinas, is another word for what
for
occurs within the space of proximity to the Other,that is, when one encounters
the face of the Other.
In his Vancouver lecture, Simon Critchley attempts to imagine what it would
mean for this kind of subject to "get on" in the real world by talking about the
hyper-contingency of the decision.He posits that each decision is elicited as a
singularityvia the relentless demand of the Other.That is to say, the decision is
7 Descartes' fundamental fascination concerned [the] thinking [the cogitoof the subject],whereas
Heidegger, in antithesis, emphasizes being [the sum of the subject]. Levinas, in one ironic stroke
that paralyzesHeidegger, questionswhether the being-there Heidegger'sDaseinisn't really the
of
expropriation someone else'slocale.
of

18. POSTDECONSTRUCTIVE
NECROPHILIA/
163
conjured by the demand that the Otherplaces upon me, or, in other words, the
material particularityof each decision, as a spontaneous ethical enactment, hinges
upon the ineffable universal ephiphany of the revelation of the Otherwithin me.
This revelation is not imparted from outside the subject, nor from another world,
but its demand is universal inasmuch as one human can begin to recognize an-
other human being's presence, and possibly, suffering. Thus, for Critchley, true
ethical decisions can only occur when brought face-to-face within the proximity
of the Other. The situational contingency of this kind of decisionism deconstructs
any modernist notions of what it would mean to be political, or even how one
would legislate such ethical activity.
On the basis of this account of the decision, Critchley argues for a non-state
based democratization, to put it differently, a globally deconstructed politics.
or,
The rearticulation of the decision-in its deconstuctionist algorithm-becomes
the link between Derrida's conception of friendship and Critchley's political de-
cision. This decision, to be rethought outside of the old orthodoxy ofvoluntarism,
springs from a new formulation of subjectivity: "This concept of friendship ...
cuts across the public-private distinction, or the division between friendship and
camaraderie, whilst informing both dimensions" (Critchley, Ethics267).
For Critchley (as it is for Derrida), the political finds its originary genesis in
the hypercontingency of the moment of the decision; in this way, the political is
an emergent property springing from the energy of deciding.But Derrida's view
of the political does not concern itself with the political subject of Western liber-
alism. His is a fascination with the human yet to come, indeed, a neohumanism
or, more radically, an unconditional hospitality. Hospitality can be thought of as
being put into the place of a radical reversal where the "Da"of my Dasein comes
under questioning: the hospitality-to come-suspends itself toward the Other
-the Otherin me-in utter subjective dis-place-ment. Thus the imagined link be-
tween the decision and hospitality is made apparent in the moment when I must
decide to give myself up, must decide to become a hostage to the Other, realizing
that my place, my beinghere,has already become the site of disenfranchisment of
an Other. must decide against myself andfor the one for whom my being is always
I
already a dislocation. This is the act of granting asylum to the accused, relief to
the afflicted, homeland to the foreigner. This is how the revelation of the de-
mand of the Othercomes to me in the form of a decision,in the form of a face and
of a hospitality yet to come.
We remember with Critchley that the responsibility of ethical involvement un-
dergoes continual renovation; that is, the risk of making decisions is taken in the
absence of normativity. In other words, politics is found in the face of the Other
and in the unanticipated apprehension of such a face. Ethics is alwaysa surprise.
Owing to the constant performance of the decision, Critchley holds that his ap-
plied Levinasian ethic does not collapse into a "vapid formalism" or an "empty
universalism" (275). Rather, it is the indeterminacy of the passage from ethics to
politics that insures that the political decision is inherently destabilized and there-
fore alwaysa singular response made over against the manifold difference of the
context in which one finds oneself. In this way politics, and the ethics from which
it issues, is always a fresh encounter with the Otherin terms of the decision. This

19. LITERATURE164
COMPARATIVE /
instability, the singular context in which the decision takes place, shelters the
possibility of any one ethical practice or custom setting itself up as a totality. This
singular context can be thought of in terms of a spatial encounter with the Other,
one that guards against the myopic particularities of the decision. The labor to
harmonize the demandwith the decisionmirrors a struggle that finds its locus in
medieval epistemology: the problem of universals, of the one and the many.
However, if we stay with only the decision, like Heidegger we will stay with a
form of the subject-postdeconstructive or not-and, whether we like it or not,
will bear the mark of the last metaphysician. Dasein has been sentenced-he, or
rather it, must die the death toward the Other.8 Instead, we must move outward,
past the intimate boundaries between the one and the Otherand explore the
dangerous but interesting territory of political community.
As we move towards a discussion of politics, we reaffirm the Levinasian maxim
that politics is ultimately deduced from ethics. We also understand that ethics is
thought of in terms of the demand of the Other,or as an immanent ethic that
comes to us in the face of the Otherand, as such, is prior to all ontology. The
infinite demand of the Otheris actualized in terms of the decision, and decon-
structive polity is nothing more than the singularity of each new decision, issu-
ing, not from the Kantian subject, but from the residual presence of the Otherin
us, from our everyday dealings with the particularity of the world. Thus, for
Critchley,ethical response finds its genesis in the demand of the Otherand through
the richness of a shared space and the singular finite context which gathers around
the decision. In other words, ethics is found in the everyday matrix of the world,
for the L6vinasian Otheris not a matter to be thought but a face to behold. Fit-
tingly, the "singularity of the context" provides the detail for ethical particular-
ization, while the demand of the Otherremains the locus of universal demand. In
this way, Levinasian ethics is essentially spatial with reference to its framing of
both demand and decision. The decision is not merely an artifact of human
subjectivity;indeed, it receives its real thrust from the demand of the Other. This
makes the decision a dynamic and unique extension, or mediation, of the phe-
nomenological space between the ethical subject and the Levinasian Otherthat
in an advent demanding hospitality comes to me and elicits my ethical response.
Because of this dynamic, every ethical decision is a new norm,though it is diffi-
cult at times to know how Critchley understands its possible function as a norm
of universal criterion. Perhaps his emphasis on the impossibility of normativity
within the ethical encounter illustrates how, for Critchley, the universal criterion
is nothing else but the infinite demand of the Other,which calls forth and pro-
vokes in me the moment of political decision. Thus, "the other's decision is made
in me, a decision made but with regard to which I am passive"(276).
Critchley maintains that with each new decision a new norm is enacted in
response to the utter singularity of the existential setting within which the ethi-
8 Though dying a death toward the Othermight be reminiscent (and perhaps a reactivation) of a
structure(as evincedin such thinkersas Girardand Calasso),this death towardthe Other
sacrificial
and its necessity not entirelyseparatefromLevinas's
is debt to
debt toJudaism,and his own sacrificial
National Socialism:he was detained in a Nazi labor camp for five yearsduring the Second World
War. is also an issue I will takeup with Derridaand Critchley their "Messianic-Cleansing"the
It in of
JudaicimpulsewithinLevinas's ethicalphilosophy.

20. POSTDECONSTRUCTIVE
NECROPHILIA/165
cal subject encounters the insatiable demand of the Levinasian Other(277). That
every decision is a leap of faith, a singular political invention, overwrites the
criterion of ethical normativity with the criterion of performance. Against ethi-
cists of every Kantian stripe, Critchley's L6vinasian ethic is not a response by a
subject to an ineffable moral law; rather, the contingency of the political deci-
sion displays a performative instability resisting any theoretical tendencies that
would otherwise render it a totalizing ontology.
For Critchley, the quality of the decision closely mirrors the ethical experience
of which it is a hegemonization. If the passage from ethics to politics were to be
thought of in terms of the decision, then Critchley's challenge is "to think the
decision outside of its traditionally voluntaristic and 'decisionistic' determina-
tions," for that would only affirm the consciousness of the liberal subject (262).
Instead, Critchley wants to think the decision as passive or unconscious: "the
decision is not something taken by a subject, but rather the subject (in so far as
one can still employ this word postdeconstructively) is taken by the decision that
is made without its volition" (263). That is, the decision is the momentary experi-
ence of an alteritywithin me, which decides me and which then vanishes awayleav-
ing no transcendental guarantees that might found a normative ethic. Levinasian
ethics-what Derrida calls la democratie venir-is jarring, destablizing, still al-
a'
ways to come. Politics must be continually performed, "a responsible decision
must be taken-here and now, again and again" (275), and the comfort and
certitude of any transcendental ethical guarantees is alleviated by the ceaseless
demand for political invention:
Derridaemphasizeshow the very indeterminacy the passagefrom ethics to politics entails that
of
the taking of a political decision must be a response to the utter singularityof a particularand
inexhaustiblecontext. The infinite ethical demand of deconstructionarisesas a responseto a sin-
gular context and callsforth the inventionof a politicaldecision. Politicsitself can here be thought
of as theart of response thesingular demandof the other,a demand that arises in a particular context-
to
althoughthe infinite demandcannot simplybe reducedto its context-and callsfor politicalinven-
tion, for creation. (276)
Because every momentary performance of the political-what Derrida has called
the "madness" of the decision-is always already a return to an originary en-
counter with the Other,politics cannot be thought of as apart from aesthetics: it
is always a performance of the irreducible trace of the LUvinasian Other.The
radical contingency of the decision-its mad, unceasing, inexhaustible perfection
-calls for the continual invention and artistry of new norms and rules, insur-
ing that no ethic, polity, or form of democratization ever establish itself as a
totality.Derridean politicization continually undermines itself: it enacts an unceas-
ing deconstruction.
The decision, writ large throughout the public realm, becomes the radical
possibility for Derrida's and Critchley's "New International"-a world-wide prac-
tice of an inexhaustible number of transnational decisions that are enacted and
which ultimately build up into the larger and more significant movement of a
globally deconstructed politics that denies the sovereignty of nation states while
nonetheless working within these nation states.
With this concept Critchley and Derrida both acknowledge the structural form
of Levinas's ethics (of the other,for them always in the lower case) and at the

21. LITERATURE166
COMPARATIVE /
same time deconstruct hisJewish political context (his Messianic Zionism). That
is, they accept "theformal notion of the ethical relation to the other in Levinas-
what Derrida calls here and elsewhere a 'structural' or 'apriori' notion of the
messianic-while refusing the specific political contentthat Levinasian ethics seem
to entail, namely the vexed question of Levinas' Zionism" (Critchley 278). A great
exchange thus takes place: Levinas's Zionism for Critchley's and Derrida's Neo-
Marxism. Critchley and Derrida negate the political/ideological-even the theo-
logical-content of Levinas's work in order to shelter their secular rendition of
the "New International" from what they have termed the "political fate" of his
ethical philosophy, namely, the vexed question of Levinas's Zionism. In their hands,
the "New International" becomes a clinically sterile humanitarian politics, one
that has its impulse outside of nation states and yet cuts itself off from one of its
most striking possibilities.
Consistent with their Marxism, there can be no politics without an enemy, no
friend without a foe. In Marx's case the foe is bourgeois Christianity; in Derrida's
and Critchley's it is liberal humanism in the form of capitalist nation states. The
enemy of the "NewInternational" proves to be any nationalism that endeavors to
totalize-to hold that justice can be incarnated within the ethnic or geograph-
ical borders of some state, nation, or tribe. On this account, modern liberal pol-
ity (democracy) is a form of foundationalism: it affirms an essential subject and
an essential view of the nation state.
As a result, this nonfoundational politics, issuing from a decentered subjectiv-
ity (externalized in the form of the postdeconstructive decision), takes its form
as a democracy come-a sort of secular Nietzschean eschaton, defined as the
to
radical immanence of the political rather than an opening onto a future utopia.
The democracy comeis coming and is always arriving-it is the arrival of the
to
arriving--and because of this is inherently unstable and therefore antagonistic
to any totalizing ideologies. This is Critchley's deterritorialized democritization:
a democracy to come that works outside the state but never against the state. It is
"the democracy to come" not in terms of futurity, but in terms of instability; that
is, it is structurally performative. The goal, then, of this ethicalanarchismis not to
function without the state, but to put pressure on the state. "Ethical anarchism"
resists political foundationalism: it resists setting up one ideology (anarchy) in
place of another (nationalism).9 What, then, is the glue that holds the "New In-
ternational" together? What is the ultimate (or penultimate) catalyst behind the
thickness of the political decision, a phenomenon that is made to do the work of
a metaphysic without itself being a metaphysic? This is not a question of what is
behind the decision and, more profoundly, the face (and this is where their
thought leans most heavily upon the brilliance of Heideggerian disclosure), but
of what is in the decision and, more interestingly, what is in the face. The en-
chantment with humanity, through an encounter with the face of the Other, the is
glue that holds the "New International" together beyondnation states-beyond
even the hypercontingency of the decision. This is the essence of Critchley's uni-
versal criterion: there were no face, no demand of the Other,there would cer-
if
tainly be no decision. Enchantment with the Other the condition of possibility
is
9 Except in the case of Levinas's displaced Judaism.

22. POSTDECONSTRUCTIVE NECROPHILIA/167
for the decision and hence of ethics for politics. The decision only comes after
private intention-after the face of the Otherhas registered itself within our sub-
jectivity. This is the insight to which Iris Murdoch has so penetratingly drawn
attention. And yet we must decide.Without decisions there would be no politics,
only interesting speculation. This is the insight that finally led Simon Critchley
to his hauntingly provocative avowal: "If ethics without politics is empty, then
politics without ethics is blind" (283).
But is the price too high to pay for Critchley's formulation of subjectivity to get
a purchase on a "globally deconstructed politics"? His recasting of subjectivity,
albeit in nonessentialized terms, still looks back to the voluntarism of Existential-
ism. Does Critchley's postdeconstructive voluntarismstill fall prey to Iris Murdoch's
critique of the Existentialists? Does the reduction of Critchley's ethical self to the
decision only show up within the public margin? Is there room, and this is the
idea that Murdoch wants to articulate, for the internal struggles that go on pri-
vately? Is there really no politics without a decision? Does Critchley's view fall
down as a soft form of utilitarianism, surrendering value (private intention) to
the brute arena of fact (the decision)? Whatever the outcome of these questions,
Critchley goes a long way towards making possible a postdeconstructive human-
ism, perhaps even a neo-humanism:
The subjectis no longer the self-positingorigin of the world;it is a hostageto the other.Humanism
should not begin from the datumof the humanbeing as an end-in-itself the foundationfor all
and
knowledge,certainty, value:rather,the humanityof the human is defined by its serviceto the
and
other.Levinasian ethics is a humanism,but it is a humanismof the other being. (67)
If this holds, then perhaps we can also entertain discussions about the possibili-
ties of ethics in a new light, one also sheltered from predictable conversations
about morality and normativity. On this provisional nonfoundational account,
Levinasian ethics may provide a way of getting on with others in the larger struc-
tures that make up our political and ethical institutions.
University of British Columbia
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