Tag: catherine belsey

“A common misreading of poststructuralist theory—that it deprives us of the power to choose—is another instance of binary thinking. If the subject is an effect of meaning, if we are not the free, unconstrained origin of our own beliefs and values, if knowledge can’t be relied on, if mastery is an illusion, so the story goes, we cannot regard ourselves as agents in our own lives.

This is not how most poststructuralist thinkers have argued, however. Deconstruction indicates, on the contrary, that meanings, values, and what we (think we) know are all open to pressure for change. Psychoanalysis, meanwhile, sees unconscious desire as defying the values that culture proposes as proper objectives. Foucault also stresses the possibility of resistance—on the basis that power is always authority over something or someone capable of disobeying. (No one, as far as I know, claims sovereignty over turnips.)

In sum, Foucault’s model of social relations is unstable, mobile, transferable: the assumptions that reinforce power can be reversed to undermine it. Derrida’s philosophy, although it removes certainty, still requires choice and responsibility, ethical and political. Jean-François Lyotard argues against bland consensus. Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou, while distancing themselves in some respects from poststructuralism, draw in different ways on its insights to put forward radical views. Both assume that we take sides.

Responsibility

Much of Derrida’s later work has been concerned with ethics, the problem of right action in a world without foundational truths as grounds for choice. Religions, in contrast, depend on such grounding. They determine what we ought to do by appealing in the last instance to the will of God, as revealed to priests or prophets. The will of God is in this sense taken as universal and ultimate, a pure and absolute reality beyond which human enquiry cannot hope to go. Secular beliefs might well find another ultimate reality to occupy the same structural position of authority: reason, for example, or the moral law, or perhaps the laws of nature. Such metaphysical values are taken as the ultimate foundations on which all other values depend.

But if values are shaped by language, and language divides the world differently from culture to culture, there can be no appeal to a universal, grounding reality. The will of God might or might not exist but, as history has shown, it seems in practice to be a site of considerable struggle, since both sides in a conflict commonly claim it for their cause. Something similar goes for reason and nature. They are often cited, in the event, as supporting opposite points of view: right and left, feminist and anti-feminist, queer and homophobic, white supremacist and anti-racist.

Can there be, then, an ethics of deconstruction, an ethics without metaphysics? Derrida’s own work is sceptical and yet, he insists, ‘affirmative’. On the one hand, the element of the other in the selfsame—the difference within cultures, languages, subjects—undermines both totalitarianism and nationalism, as well as all other attempts to bring societies or groups into line with a single identity. On the other hand, Derrida argues, it does not do away with the responsibility to take account of the existing differences. Values not only have a history; they also differ from themselves. They can therefore be modified, if not in the light of a fixed idea of the good, at least in the hope of realizing, one day, the trace of an alternative that also informs them. Derrida calls this way of thinking ‘messianicity’: not the promise of a specific messiah, who would fulfil an individual scripture, Christian, say, or Jewish, but the expectation of a different future ‘to come’ (avenir à venir).”