THE CROSSING OF THE POLITICAL: DERRIDA AND RICOEURBETWEEN THE PURITY OF PHILOSOPHY AND THE TRAGEDY OFACTION Benjamin Boudou Presses de Sciences Po | Raisons politiques 2012/1 - No 45pages 211-233

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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Boudou Benjamin, « La traversée du politique : Derrida et Ricoeur entre pureté de la philosophie et tragique de

l'action »,

Raisons politiques, 2012/1 No 45, p. 211-233.

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How to cite this article:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Boudou Benjamin, « La traversée du politique : Derrida et Ricoeur entre pureté de la philosophie et tragique de

l'action »,

Raisons politiques, 2012/1 No 45, p. 211-233. DOI : 10.3917/rai.045.0211

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Benjamin Boudou

The Crossing of the Political: Derrida and Ricoeur between the Purity of Philosophy and the Tragedy of Action

The present text is not concerned with an ap-proach to the respective philosophical careers of Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Derrida, an enterprise

that would deserve far more space than is available. Yet while much has already been written on the metonymic opposition between hermeneutics and deconstruction,1 far fewer texts compare their ap-proaches to the political.2 However, both are responses to the same general problem – the relationship between ethics and politics – and rely on shared concepts, notably of justice, sovereignty, and respon-sibility. I will therefore attempt to deploy these notions to analyze the methodological and theoretical differences between the two writ-ers and on this basis draw out a dividing line between two philo-sophical attitudes towards political theory: one welcoming (Ricoeur) and one distrustful (Derrida). In this way, I intend to follow their

1. We may cite Jean-Luc Amalric, Ricoeur, Derrida, l’enjeu de la métaphore (Paris: PUF, 2006) and Pirovolakis, Reading Derrida and Ricoeur.

2. An exception is the philosophical approach to the ethical and political debate taken by Johann Michel, “Herméneutique et déconstruction. Le différend éthico-politique entre P. Ricoeur et J. Derrida,” Études phénoménologiques 41-42 (December 2005): 325-342.

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“crossing,” both in the sense of the philosophical cross-section they enact that runs right through the political (the aporia or the test of this transaction) and of the way in which their philosophy associates with the political (not only as an obstacle to be tested but also as a space to be crossed). To do this, I will first examine the place and the dimension they accord to the political. From this I will show the philosophers’ difference of opinion regarding the question of sover-eignty and selfhood that defines an event-based approach in Derrida versus an institution-based approach in Ricoeur. Then, I will apply this analysis to the problem of hospitality, contrasting the uncon-ditional demands of Derrida with the practical wisdom of Ricoeur. In conclusion I invoke Richard Rorty’s appeal to the “priority of democracy to philosophy”3 in order to evaluate the contributions of Ricoeur and Derrida to political theory. My general point is that Ricoeur helps finding a way out of Derrida’s aporia.

The Place of the Political

Ricoeur and Derrida characterize politics in different ways. First of all, Ricoeur takes both the vertical (state) dimension and the horizontal (social, community) dimension of politics into account, while Derrida appears to restrict it to the vertical dimension, to the issues of the sovereignty and rationality of the state. In short, Derrida concerns himself more with the aspect of domination, while Ricoeur deals with that of coexistence. More troublesome, consider-ing the frequency with which the notion of the “transaction” arises in Derrida, is that the transaction always appears in the context of its impossibility, under the sign of the imperfection of the pure concept in the duplicity of the real. “The transition to the law, to politics and to ‘the third’ constitutes, in a certain way, a sort of fall,” Derrida writes in relation to hospitality, while conceding that it is this very transition that makes it effective. 4 We must read Ricoeur in parallel: “There is a middle path to be traced between a direct piece of advice,

3. Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

4. Jacques Derrida, “Une hospitalité à l’infini,” in Autour de Jacques Derrida. Manifeste pour l’hospitalité – aux Minguettes, ed. Mohammed Seffahi (Grigny: Paroles d’Aube, 1999), 100.

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The Crossing of the Political – III

which will prove most disappointing, and resignation to insoluble opposition.”5 The two approaches – the assumption of the tragic by Ricoeur, the promotion of a poetics by Derrida – seem all the more divergent when set side by side. It is therefore on the basis of politi-cal theory that their “tangential”6 relationship must be interrogated in order to approach the epistemological challenge of evaluating the heuristic potential of concepts forged within a philosophical corpus for political theory.

Meanwhile, the question of the political does not arise at the same moment or in the same way in the two bodies of text. Ricoeur treats the issue directly in his readings “about the political,” as his early attention to the thought of Hannah Arendt shows. Likewise, his famous article “The Political Paradox,” first published in the jour-nal Esprit in 1957, demonstrates how he wants to deal with “current affairs” (the recently crushed uprising in Budapest) and to draw from them critical thought about both the political in general and politics in particular.7 As for Derrida, the question is more complex. For many readers – even faithful ones – his work underwent a turning point in the mid-1980s, tackling more explicitly political matters, as evidenced by the subjects of his seminars and the books he published during this period.8 Nevertheless, the philosopher himself vigorously denied this change in direction and asserted the continuity of his political concerns:

5. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), 243.

6. “Tangential, tendentious and intangible”: this is how Derrida describes his relationship with Ricoeur in Derrida, “The Word: Giving, Naming, Calling.”

7. Paul Ricoeur, “The Political Paradox,” in History and Truth (Evanston, Il.: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 247-270.

8. The seminars: “Nationality and Philosophical Nationality” (1985-1988), “Politics of Friendship” (1988-1991), “Questions of Responsibility” (1992-2001) – and others on forgiveness, hospitality, the death penalty – up to “The Beast and the Sovereign” (2001-2003). The books: The Other Heading, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992); Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994); Politics of Friendship, tr. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997); “Force of Law,” trans. Mary Quaintance, in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3-67; On Cosmopolitansim, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London: Routledge, 2001); Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas; Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas, Le con-cept de “11 septembre”: Dialogues à New York (octobre-décembre 2001) avec Giovanna Borradori (Paris: Galilée, 2004).

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“[…] there never was […] a political turn or ethical turn in “de-construction,” at least, not as I experienced it. The thinking of the political has always been a thinking of différance and the thinking of différance always a thinking of the political, of the contour and the limits of the political, especially around the enigma or the autoim-mune double bind of the democratic.”9

In Force of Law he explains that “such a deconstructive ques-tioning is through and through a questioning of law and justice […] of the foundations of law, morality, and politics,” while recognizing that his “oblique” treatment of these questions may “apparently” give the impression it is absent.10 Derrida wants to insist on the continu-ity of his political concern, on an “always-already” politics of decon-struction. My hypothesis is that, instead, he needs to show that his scholar and political life are two faces of the same coin. Derrida the politicized, petition-signing man appears to want to respond to the accusations that he is a nihilist or apolitical, which came to a head when Heidegger’s connections to Nazism became common knowl-edge. In addition, the attacks by Jürgen Habermas and the pamphlet by Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut11 aimed at the whole of his work, meaning that accepting a turning point would have lent credence to the accusation of an early, “irresponsible” Derrida and a later one that had made honorable amends. Furthermore, speaking of an ethi-cal or political turn would suggest a partitioning of disciplines (before philosophy, now politics) that is foreign to his thought. Though the turning point is not evident, it nonetheless remains the case that the theme of the political appears. With regard to the mingling of schol-arly and political matters, I might apply to him what he said of Carl Schmitt: “What is always remarkable with the great philosophers of politics, with all philosophers when they deal with politics, is that, more than ever, their philosophemes are also, in a very marked way, those of citizens and politicians of their own time, implicated and exposed in the national political field of their time.”12 The question

9. Derrida, Rogues, 39.10. Derrida, “Force of Law,” 8.11. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence

(New York: Polity, 1990); Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, La pensée 68 (Paris: Gallimard, 1988).

12. Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010), 51.

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The Crossing of the Political – V

of hospitality, such as it appears as a “philosopheme” and as a politi-cal assertion, is a perfect example of this.

However, I will show why Derrida’s political thought is based on a reductive view of its subject: he poorly defines what he seeks to oppose, or even attributes to politics some features he has already deconstructed. Paradoxically, it is also at the very moment that he approaches “public” issues that he further “privatizes” his vocabulary – to use Rorty’s phrase.13 The suspicion he develops with regard to the political is accompanied by the development of a radical ethi-cal and philosophical line of thought that he calls “indeconstruct-ible.” By making “deconstruction” the condition for “justice,” and vice versa, he presents us with a yardstick that only functions in the context of his own thought. In short, there is no way that Derrida’s political thought can become autonomous, enclosed as it is in a phil-osophical container.

As I stated in the introduction, Ricoeur and Derrida approach the question of the political from the point of view of ethics. Does this mean they accord priority to the good over the just, that is, to essential values over the procedures of justice? At first glance, one might think that the focus on forgiveness or hospitality represents a moralization of politics. Ricoeur and Derrida would thus be reviv-ing ethics in a disenchanted world. After all, Ricoeur himself, when setting out the tasks of political philosophy, states that “it is in the reemergence of a heritage still older than the Enlightenment – and no more exhausted than it – that modern identity may find the cor-rectives it needs to the perverse effects that today disfigure the unde-niable achievements of this modernity.”14 Ricoeur finds this ancient heritage above all in the “Hebrew Torah,” “the gospel of the early Church” and “the Greek ethic of the Virtues.” Similarly, and for example in regard to hospitality, Derrida wants to “[revive] the tradi-tional meaning of an expression and [restore] a memorable heritage to its former dignity.”15 Thus, neither thinker opts for a wholly con-ventional approach to politics, but as we will see, they use different arguments to do so. Even so, this reveals their shared ambiguity with

13. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 125 ff.

14. Paul Ricoeur, “Langage politique et rhétorique,” in Lectures 1. Autour du politique, (Paris: Seuil, 1991 [1990]), 173.

15. Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism, 5.

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regard to political liberalism, and more generally their philosophical vigilance with regard to political thought: against “the art of separa-tion” or liberalism as a “world of walls,”16 they constantly emphasize the porosity of these frontiers – sometimes to defend them, some-times to combat them – for example between the private and the public, or the religious and the political domains.

The Institution or the Event

The Impossible Transaction

Derrida’s reflection on justice is an opportunity for him to change his “method.” The publication of Force of Law represents a major turning point in the Derridean mode of constructing an argu-ment. Up to this point it was possible to define deconstruction as the exposure of structural instabilities in inherited concepts, in an effort to hone the critical senses and trace what is excluded or erased in the formation of an idea. The traces left by this – violent and unjust – erasure are the starting points for the “deconstructive” reading, points that are located in the text itself, but that are made effective by the act of reading. Although he was mocked for this, Derrida was right to describe deconstruction negatively: as neither analysis, nor criticism, nor method, nor act,17 it is an ongoing process that we can merely make visible. Derrida sheds light on the lineaments of deconstruction in relation to specific themes (the supplement, writ-ing, etc.). These lineaments are potentially present everywhere: eve-rything is “deconstructible” because everything is “constructed,” and the values or decisions that are supposed to underlie them inevitably entail exclusion. This demystification effort is pursued by Derrida in Force of Law in regard to the law, which is “essentially deconstruct-ible, whether because it is founded, constructed on interpretable and transformable textual strata […] or because its ultimate foundation is by definition unfounded.” He continues: “The fact that law is

16. Michael Walzer, “Liberalism and the Art of Separation,” Political Theory 12(3): 315-330.17. His arguments are clearly set out in Jacques Derrida “Letter to a Japanese Friend,”

in Derrida and Différance, ed. David Wood and Robert Bernasconi (Warwick: Parousia, 1985).

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The Crossing of the Political – VII

deconstructible is not bad news. We may even see in this a stroke of luck for politics, for all historical progress.”18

But while there are few among modern thinkers who would deny the human, historical, and contingent aspect of law and the authority underlying it, Derrida continues to scratch at the “textual strata” and discovers what no one believed he was ever prepared to discover: a foundation. This foundation is justice: “Justice in itself, if such a thing exists, outside or beyond law, is not deconstructible. No more than deconstruction itself […]. Deconstruction is justice.”19 Without getting too deeply involved in the philosophical debate that this declaration initiated, it would appear that this is the pivot of Derrida’s entire project. Directly inspired by Emmanuel Lévinas, Derrida names justice as the condition of ethics, which is infinite because articulated in relation to the Other. “Messianicity without messianism,” in his formula, justice is a pure openness to the event, understood as something that arrives independently of a horizon of expectation or an invitation.20 Politics and justice must thus be thought of from the perspective of pure disruption, invention, the “event with no prior grammar”21 that happens to politics, within politics and beyond politics.

Yet this justice is inseparable from law, which alone makes justice possible and accomplishes it.22 However, if the law is the condition of possibility of justice, then justice itself, in its purity, is unreachable. This gap between justice and law, purity and impurity, event and rule, the incalculable and the calculable, corresponds to the site of the transaction between the philosophical and the politi-cal. It is a conflict between an idea, or a demand, and its accom-plishment in the pluralism of the human realm. The manifestation of an idea – such as justice, but also the pure forgiveness and the unconditional hospitality that it entails – in the social and political

18. Derrida, “Force of Law,” 14.19. Derrida, “Force of Law,” 14-15.20. We may cite for example: “This would be the opening to the future or to the coming

of the other as the advent of justice, but without horizon of expectation and without prophetic prefiguration. […] The messianic exposes itself to absolute surprise [in] the phenomenal form of peace or of justice.” Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” in Acts of Religion, trans. S. Weber, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002).

21. Derrida, “Une hospitalité à l’infini,” 98.22. For a detailed explanation of this process, see Björn Thorsteinsson La question de la

justice chez Jacques Derrida (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007).

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world is always an aporia, an impossible and yet necessary compro-mise. Must politics or law therefore be understood as last resorts that we must simply make the best of? What role should be assigned to this notion of justice? Does it appeal to the principles of liberty and equality? Is it something that can be invoked in public debate? By whom? Derrida leaves us at the site of this aporia and, although it may well be “ridiculous” to encounter “paralysis, hesitation, or neutralization”23 there, we believe that Ricoeur comes to resolve the aporia by developing a practice of the transaction. In short, Ricoeur starts out from where Derrida comes to a halt, and makes it pos-sible to anchor this impossible structure in the realm of practical wisdom.

Equality against Asymmetry

While for Derrida justice refers to the singularity of the Other, Ricoeur understands it as a way out both from the interpersonal rela-tions and from the wholly asymmetrical relationship of ethics. Since he understands justice in its judiciary sense, Ricoeur quite clearly separates it from philosophy. While he also acknowledges the “over-whelming” force of justice, with Ricoeur the notion of the just – taken “between the legal and the good,” that is, between the judicial and the ethical – comes to form the heart of the social bond.24

First of all, justice is a result of interpersonal relations: to the dialogue between I and you, of which friendship is the exemplary manifestation, there is added a third figure, “the third,” which implies an objective equality of treatment within a wider commu-nity. This is the plurality, in Arendt’s sense of the term, that should be aimed for. Ricoeur views this transition to plurality, “a plea for the anonymous,”25 on the basis of three interconnected moments: the self (selfhood, implying a certain constancy capable of promising and taking responsibility for actions), the other (otherness, the other self of everyday life whom we do not necessarily know but with

23. Derrida speaking on the radio program “À voix nue,” France Culture, 1998.24. See the opposition between “the ideal of equal distribution” (Ricoeur) and “the de-

mand for infinite responsibility” (Derrida) proposed by Michel in “Herméneutique et déconstruction,” 233.

25. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 195.

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The Crossing of the Political – IX

whom we live), and the third (the institution, the social milieu). He constantly reflects on the relationships between these three terms to describe the transition from one to another and to demonstrate how they are deeply interwoven. The self is defined by its capacity: “I am that being who can evaluate his actions and, in assessing the goals of some of them to be good, is capable of evaluating himself and of judging himself to be good.” 26 The other, who is reached through solicitude, is a necessary (not a surplus) intermediary in order to render this effective. Finally, the institutions anchor the criteria of the just, guaranteeing the equality of the relationship and material-izing the “will to live together.” Ricoeur continues: “Equality […] is to life in institutions what solicitude is to interpersonal relations.”27

Secondly, if Ricoeur emphasizes equality so much, it is in order to better distinguish his position from the hyperbolic asym-metry of the relationship with the Other found in the thought of Lévinas: against the epiphany of the face described in the latter’s strictly ethical thought, Ricoeur asserts the role of reciprocity. A tireless reader of Aristotle, Ricoeur holds that this is first estab-lished in friendship and that, through equality and the expansion of mutuality to multiple peers, becomes justice and politics.28 In other words, in Ricoeur there is no radical divide between the eth-ics of otherness and politics, but rather a difference of scope. A single gesture underlies the small-scale, immediate relationship between two individuals and the large-scale relationship mediated by institutions. He writes: “It is the same charity that gives mean-ing to the social institution and to the event of the encounter.”29 The consequences for his interpretation of the gap between ethics and politics are considerable, above all if we compare it with that of Derrida: while for the latter the event, the irruption of the Other, is the entry point for the problem of justice and politics – an entry point that is at once the exit point, given politics is always over-run by this hyperbolic Other – for Ricoeur it is the institution that must function as the field of research insofar as it is the first site

26. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 181.27. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 202. See also Paul Ricoeur, The Just, trans. David Pellauer

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), xiii-xiv.28. For a detailed study of friendship in Ricoeur in relation to Aristotle, see Gaëlle Fiasse,

L’autre et l’amitié chez Aristote et Paul Ricoeur (Louvain: Peeters, 2006).29. Ricoeur, History and Truth, 103.

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of a political relationship between equals. Thus, in a sense echo-ing Derrida, Ricoeur writes: “There are very few pure events, and they cannot be retained nor even forecast and organized without a minimum degree of institutionalization.”30

I should now specify the consequences of this opposition between event and institution for the definition of politics. On sev-eral different occasions, Ricoeur contrasts “the political” [le poli-tique] with “politics” [la politique]: the political refers to the foun-dation, while politics manifests itself in distribution. In somewhat classical fashion, Ricoeur defines the political as the structure and politics as the movement, and ascribes to each its own temporali-ty.31 However, Ricoeur’s political paradigm evolves together with the historical contingencies he confronts: the texts assembled in History and Truth in 1964 (“Non-Violent Man and His Presence to History,” “State and Violence,” “The Political Paradox”) are wholly connected to the problem of the State and its power. In this way he formulates his thesis of an autonomy of the political via the autonomy of the State. From this he draws a well-known consequence: that the State engenders its own specific evils. Later, even though he retains a vigilance with regard to the foundation of the State on a legitimized act of violence, Ricoeur distances himself from this State-based paradigm of the political and turns his atten-tion to the issues of the distribution of power within politics. From a problematic of evil and violence associated with the excesses of the state, Ricoeur’s thought evolves towards conflict of justification and democratic pluralism.

Derrida, meanwhile, does not provide a literal definition of either politics or the political. It is, however, striking that, suspi-cious of the political as his discourse is, it is still largely defined by the paradigm of the State, sometimes even reduced to the national interest. Specifically, the paradox of Derrida’s political thought is this: he constantly deconstructs sovereignty – understood in the broader sense of complete control, of power over oneself and oth-ers, of the “selfhood” of an “I can” in a different sense to that set out by Ricoeur – but in doing so he construes politics solely in the con-text of this sovereignty. For Derrida, sovereignty takes a resolutely

30. Ricoeur, History and Truth, 105.31. Ricoeur, “The Political Paradox.”

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Schmittian turn, although he is more than cautious with regard to the German jurist. Undoubtedly he is working to deconstruct the supposed indivisibility of sovereignty, its fantasy of self-foundation and continuity (in a word, the arkhe), but he ends up reading poli-tics as nothing more than a question of the State. To return to the typology used by Ricoeur, Derrida only takes into consideration the vertical axis, precisely because he seeks to denounce its claim to verticality. His arguments thus tend to radicalize the other aspect – the ethical – and the two become both inseparable and irrecon-cilable. The strong sense of sovereignty is matched by an equally exaggerated meaning of the ethical: in order to resist the sovereign’s absolute desire to control, there is only the radical disruption of the event, the absolute unpredictability of what is to come which prevents any possibility of foresight, calculation, or governmentali-ty.32 In other words, the only response to this power is an-archy: a renunciation of the arkhe33 is necessary together with the loss of identity, power, and control that this entails; this is where responsi-bility then becomes possible, caught between this renunciation and the need to act.

If we take up this line of argument, we can interpret the work of Ricoeur as a response or a proposition that would come after the aporia of this messianism that is at once urgent and impos-sible, that Derrida himself has characterized as “desperate.”34 First of all, it is striking to note that Derrida disregards the distinction established by Ricoeur in Oneself as Another between “selfhood” and “sameness,” a distinction that makes it possible to save the con-cept of identity from its very focus on “identity.” The “I can” that Derrida calls into question is the basis of Ricoeur’s anthropology that gives meaning to the ethical, political, legal, and moral consist-ency of humankind. Ricoeur is attentive to the connection between this “I” and the other: selfhood, or the capacity to be faithful to oneself, is a condition of memory and promise; this is what makes

32. See Derrida’s arguments in “The Beast and the Sovereign” and Rogues.33. Moreover, it is here that the continuity between Derrida’s philosophy and politics is

most evident: deconstruction as an undermining of origin and its authority creates a di-rect link between the question of writing in the “early” Derrida and that of sovereignty in the “late” Derrida: “The problematic of writing is opened by calling into question the value of arkhe,” he writes in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984), 6.

34. Derrida, Specters of Marx.

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responsibility possible, by attaching it to an identity that is neither static nor wholly unstable. Rather, I observe that Derrida puts back together what Ricoeur has patiently taken apart and makes self-hood a component of sameness. As a result, Derrida is forced once more to pose a radical distinction between the institution and the event, here reflected in the opposition between the calculable or conditional and the incalculable or unconditional. This, I suggest, is evidence of a profoundly different interpretation of the sense of the “possible” in that “I can.”35 For Derrida, who rejects it, it corre-sponds to “what may happen” and therefore to a possible future that we can imagine, picture, or anticipate. “I can,” in Derrida’s view, means “I can do it again,” “I can because I know.” This implies an absence of real responsibility, because it is nothing more than the application of a pre-existing knowledge, and as such involves no creation. For Ricoeur, who values it, “I can” means “I am able to do so,” and I am therefore responsible for what I do, and I can answer for it, be accountable for it, but also make promises. This is a radi-cal divide between the two thinkers. Decision, responsibility, and action: these three concepts are taken in two opposing directions. One leads to an aporia in which ethics and politics are irreconcil-able, the other to a practical wisdom.

Politics of Hospitality: An Impossible Crossing or Merely a Difficult One?

How is this difference reflected on a truly political level? In what sense does the practical wisdom of Ricoeur offer an escape from Derrida’s aporia? Let us examine an example both have worked on and that serves to illustrate the dialogue established between philoso-phy and politics: that of hospitality. Although both thinkers have taken this as an example (both illustrative and exemplary) of a trans-action between values and practices – the “tragedy of action” – they do not place this transaction at the same level. For Derrida, hospital-ity is political insofar as it becomes something other than the pure concept of hospitality (“unconditional hospitality”); for Ricoeur it is a political and moral value that should inform concrete practices.

35. On this point, see also Suzanne Guerlac, “The Fragility of the Pardon,” in Derrida and the Time of the Political, ed. Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).

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To put it in the same terms as their debate on forgiveness, for the former, hospitality appears to be impossible, while for the latter it is merely difficult.

A Practical Wisdom of the Welcome

Practical wisdom is defined as the continually renewed “media-tion” between the moral rule and the real situation, a conflict con-stantly encountered alone and in the community. Ethics and politics must make their calculations on the basis of contradictory realities, something that Ricoeur calls the “tragedy of action,” as he puts it: “practical wisdom consists in inventing conduct that will best satisfy the exception required by solicitude, by betraying the rule to the smallest extent possible.”36 Called “moral judgment in situation,”37 it corresponds to a hermeneutics of action: it is a matter of com-ing and going between experience and the horizon of expectation, in order to sharpen one’s judgment and become more (or more adequately) responsible. Ricoeur maintains “expectations” which must however be “determined, hence finite and relatively modest”38 – something that distances him from Derrida, who sets his sights on the “to-come,” (l’à-venir) which is indeterminable by definition. The challenge of the democracy or of the justice to-come is precisely to abandon any such horizon of expectation that does not escape the logic of the foreseeable and the calculable. On the contrary, practical wisdom is a mode of thought that orients action towards a transac-tion between our principles (or the principles of a community) and the requirements of a specific action here and now. This “phronetic” structure is applied by Ricoeur to describe the different modes of transition between the just (a principle) and the equitable (a practice in a situation riven by conflict) or between a fundamental ethic and regional ethics.39

Within this structure of thought, hospitality appears as both a concept and a practice. As a concept it is modeled on the paradigm

36. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 269.37. Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 240.38. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volume 3, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David

Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 215.39. See Paul Ricoeur, “From the Moral to the Ethical and to Ethics,” in Reflections on the

Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 45-57.

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of translation; as a practice it corresponds to the transaction between principle and praxis, and between ethics and politics. In both cases, hospitality is a mode of perceiving what is alien and of relating to it. Led to this approach at once by hermeneutics (translation) and psychoanalysis (the unconscious), Ricoeur lays the groundwork for a politics of hospitality.

Like his ethics and his politics, Ricoeur views translation through the prism of the tragedy of action: as difficult as it may be, as paradoxical as it may appear, translation has always existed and is integral to human plurality. It is thus useless to lament the continuing imperfectability of translation, for proper and foreign will coexist in different spheres. The test of the foreign remains unsurpassable, but it remains an experience of the “hospitality of language.” We might treat this hospitality as no more than a meta-phor, but Ricoeur mobilizes it to introduce, in turn, the ethics of hospitality to translation. Thus linking translation and hospitality, Ricoeur ascribes a practical foundation to hospitality and an ethical ambition to translation: the goal of hospitality will not be to remove the boundaries between what is local and what is foreign but rather to accept the strangeness/foreignness in “us” in order to better wel-come the other.

The practice of hospitality is constructed in a similar man-ner with regard to the paradigm of psychoanalysis. For Ricoeur, in essence, it all starts with a fantasy of belonging and of coher-ence: “The feeling of being at home. This feeling of being secure is one experienced by those I refer to as ‘established nationalities.’ For them, the stranger is simply something external and unknown, something that is “not us.”40 The danger here is to make coincide what is outside with what does not belong to my community (us), i.e. the stranger with the enemy. The second stage is that we realize that the other-enemy was a fantasy, because we understand through the tropes of psychoanalysis that we fantasize our own identity into existence (“the discovery of our own strangeness”). “What do we belong to?” is transformed into “Who am I?” Linking the ques-tion of identity and belonging through the question of the stranger is not new in Ricoeur’s writings. Nevertheless, it becomes more

40. Paul Ricoeur, “Étranger, moi-même,” in Semaines sociales: L’immigration (Paris: Bayard, 1997), 95-96.

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significant following his reading of Michael Walzer, who makes political belonging the first political good to be distributed.41 However, in developing this joint institution of identity and com-munity, Ricoeur attempts to clarify what Walzer has not taken into account, namely the origin of the distinction between member and stranger.42 This concern for the initial fragmentation of humanity and the ethical and political positions this entails is at the heart of Ricoeur’s notion of hospitality. He pursues this reflection on identity and belonging in the political sphere in “The Condition of the Stranger,”43 where he confronts (at least) two major problems in political theory: (1) the asymmetry between the clearly-iden-tified member of a political community and the generic stranger; (2) the very sense of belonging that escapes the members of the community. He responds in part to these two problems, repeating the hermeneutic gesture of a knowledge of oneself in light of the knowledge of the other: making sense of “our” belonging makes it possible to identify the stranger, to characterize him as such, and to perceive our identity as differential and not as “ontological.” “Oneself as another”: that also applies to “ourselves,” members of the same community. This “unsaid” in “us” can only be enunciated in the crossing of the otherness of strangers. Ricoeur thus recog-nizes the importance of a shared identity over and against a deraci-nated contractualism, but its establishment escapes objectification and substantialization. Belonging and community are rooted in the ipse, in a narrative identity.

Throughout the text Ricoeur shows himself to be sensitive towards the communitarian problem, while maintaining an ambigu-ous relationship with procedural theories. His texts on John Rawls, written in the heat of the debate between communitarians and liber-als, thus constitute an attempt to pragmatically reconcile the good and the just: contrary to a hierarchical reading of their relationship (the good has priority over the just or vice versa), Ricoeur empha-sizes the circularity of their connection, drawing attention to the contextual nature of the reflexive equilibrium. “A procedural con-ception of justice is not enough in itself, but helps to formalize a

41. See Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983), especially Chapter 2.

42. See Ricoeur, “The Plurality of Instances of Justice,” The Just, 79.43. Paul Ricoeur, “La condition d’étranger,” Esprit (March/April 2006 [1996]), 264-275.

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sense of justice that is always presupposed.”44 This back and forth between the intuitions born in the history and culture of a given community and rationally-constructed principles – in short between a sense and the principles of justice – is evidence of an attempt to save Rawls from himself: against the temptation to withdraw himself from the historical density of the idea of justice, the latter should confront more directly the transplantation of his theory to the “soil,” the “humus” – at once Jewish, Christian, Greek, and Roman – that nourished the Golden Rule.45 Ricoeur is thus closer to Michael Walzer at this point, on the one hand taking up the question of the intrinsic plurality of the modes of distribution (the famous “spheres of justice”), and on the other arguing for an “elaboration” of the idea of justice between substance and procedure.46 Nevertheless, by leaving “unsaid” the notion of “shared understanding” that is meant to root Walzer’s understanding of justice, he attempts to avoid the foundationalist and essentialist trap.

The Unconditional Demand

Beginning in the mid-1990s, the notion of hospitality comes to the fore in Derrida’s work for at least three reasons. Firstly, his own political engagement with the issue of illegal immigrants; secondly, the notion enables him to pursue the deconstruction of the ipse he started in the context of the general problem of responsibility; and thirdly, it represents a return to the thought of Lévinas, which he draws on to develop the notion of the welcome and hospitality as a fundamental ethics. In this sense politics, deconstruction, and ethics converge.

To turn first to his political engagement, Derrida had opposed the policies of Alain Juppé’s government, supporting the regu-larization of the illegal immigrants who had occupied first Saint-Ambroise and then Saint-Bernard Church in 1996.47 He signed

44. “John Rawls: de l’autonomie morale à la fiction du contrat social,” (1990) in Ricoeur, Lectures 1, 215-16.

45. “Le cercle de la demonstration,” (1988) in Ricoeur, Lectures 1, 224 and 230.46. See Walzer, Spheres of Justice and Thick and Thin (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre

Dame Press, 1996).47. Jacques Derrida, “Manquements du droit à la justice (mais que manque-t-il donc aux

‘sans-papiers’?)” in Marx en jeu by Jacques Derrida, Jean-Pierre Vincent, and Marc Guillaume (Paris: Descartes, 1997).

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petitions against the “crime of hospitality” and took a stand in the press.48 Unlike in 1995, he did not join the committee in support of Lionel Jospin in 2002, largely because he reproached the socialist government for having been too “timid” on the issue of immigra-tion. Without going so far as to speak of a radicalization of Derrida, I can say that the themes of forgiveness and of hospitality he addressed in his seminar at the EHESS (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) seem to have offered numerous opportunities to take bold public positions, something he had long refrained from doing.49

Subsequently, as I have said, the deconstruction of identity leads to a distinction between the rule (calculable, repeatable) and the event (unpredictable, singular) that makes any decision impos-sible. Caught in the aporia, the responsible subject must undergo this impossible test – the turbulent, irresolvable condition of the action – while nevertheless allowing political, legal, and ethical innovation. This structure is applied to the question of hospital-ity, and melds it to an unconditional hospitality and a conditional hospitality. Unconditional hospitality, by definition, is an open-ness without condition to the event embodied here by the one who arrives, the stranger. The stranger of whom we know nothing and of whom we should know nothing is the unforeseeable and the wholly singular: “the host [hôte] who receives should, in principle, receive even before knowing anything of the guest [hôte] he welcomes. The pure welcome consists not only in not knowing or acting as if we didn’t know but in avoiding all questions concerning the identity of the other.”50

To avoid confusions that often arise with regard to uncon-ditional hospitality, it must be emphasized that it is by definition impractical. Derrida does not advocate a radical opening of national borders, but attempts to account for ethics as such, understood as an

48. He signed the declaration of June 9, 1996 (“We, the undersigned, declare that we offer our hospitality to any member of the Saint Ambroise group to provide them with assistance or to host them under our roofs, until such time as they have obtained the necessary papers, as we will do in future for any person in a similar situation.”) and the “Open letter from the ‘17’ to the government” on October 17, 1997 (he added his voice to that of the 17, who had published their appeal a few days earlier to “urgently restore the sense of hospitality that has abandoned the spirit of too many French people.”)

49. See Benoît Peeters, Derrida, 290, 575 and 627.50. Derrida, “Une hospitalité à l’infini,” 98.

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opening originating from alterity. This is the condition of possibil-ity for any form of relation. Here it is hard to distinguish Derrida’s thought from that of Lévinas; Derrida renames what Lévinas calls ethics, taking up the motifs of the welcome and the host from the work of the latter.51 Further still, he displaces the reasoning fol-lowed by Lévinas on “the third,” intended to introduce the notion of justice on the basis of the asymmetry of the face-to-face encoun-ter. The third imposes equality but, as Derrida shows, it can also introduce violence in the form of the “juridical and political.”52 Yet the initial asymmetry – the subject or self, host, hostage to the other – may also contain a violence to which the third must respond. In short, with the Other, as with the third, we do not escape the risk of violence. On the one hand, unconditional hospitality opens us up to the possibility of violence, to a “pure mortal charity,”53 inso-far as it opens up to the Other without distinguishing friend from foe, without calculation or caution. On the other, there is violence too in conditional hospitality, because it discriminates, selects (and therefore excludes), interrogates, and challenges. The double bind Derrida brings to light at the heart of Lévinas’s text also applies to his own concept of hospitality: there is the same “juridical and political becoming” of the law of hospitality, which wholly perverts it even as it makes it possible.

To be more specific, Derrida exposes a dual dilemma inherent to hospitality: on the one hand, making hospitality empirical is to inscribe it in the violence of the juridical and political, but also to enact an openness that is beneficial to the community. On the other, making hospitality pure is to get lost in a quest for the infinite and to expose identity to the greatest dangers, but also to accept that the hospitality of nations is still perfectible. Finally, and this conclu-sion may disappoint, if pure hospitality as such exists, it can only be poetic.54 What remains is the personal aporia of having to reconcile what is irreconcilable, the “tragedy of action” in Derrida’s sense: “I do all I can to try to adjust my ‘commitments’ to the unconditional

51. See Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas.52. Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, 21.53. Derrida, “Une hospitalité à l’infini,” 98.54. Jacques Derrida, “Responsabilité et hospitalité,” in De l’hospitalité: Autour de Jacques

Derrida, ed. Mohammed Seffahi (Genouilleux: Le passe du vent, 2001).

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affirmation that runs through ‘deconstruction.’ […] I do often feel these aporias as tragic pains.”55

Faced with this complex approach, it must be asked what place remains for politics, and what task Derrida acknowledges for it or assigns to it. In other texts, less openly directed towards Lévinas, Derrida examines the gap he sees between the two poles of hos-pitality. Indeed, his hypothesis seems so poorly adapted to it that he is repeatedly questioned about his position in political debates. But while Derrida responds to this request, he remains reluctant to remove certain ambiguities. Above all, no resolution to the aporia is possible, its two poles must be retained, and it is in crossing this impossibility that we make action possible. In fact, the operation of transaction designates this crossing, which results in an improve-ment to the law, assuming that the transaction is good. This improve-ment does not make the law adequate for bringing about justice, but brings it closer. The transaction thus opens up the creation of new juridical and political arrangements that are better adjusted to values of freedom and equality (notably in the right to vote) for the stranger and with nationals, respectively, and above all values that are more critical towards injustices (Derrida is quicker to list injustices than positive values):

“[The absolute pole of unconditional hospitality is] the place from which immediate and concrete matters of urgency are dictated. The political task then remains of finding the best ‘legislative’ trans-action, the best ‘juridical’ conditions to bring it about, so that in a given situation the ethics of hospitality are not in principle violated – and are respected as far as possible.”56

The criticism to be formulated is thus not so much the apoliti-cal stance or the paralysis that a “Derridean politics” would lead to, but rather the speed with which he dispatches political and juridical matters. It is troubling that he does not spend more time working over these innovations, advances, or inventions. It is true that in order to be visible as such they must cross the order of the calculable that neutralizes their singularity. But I regret that Derrida appeals

55. Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 128-129.

56. Derrida, Paper Machine, 131.

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more to an act of faith than to an attentive reading of the political. Would it not be better to accept a more prosaic methodology with regard to political theory? Derrida himself admits as much, saying he focuses on the “philosophical dimension” he perceives in all “politi-cal experiments”; he reminds us that “‘true’ political action always engages a philosophy.”57 This brings together both the philosophi-cal concern for dealing with politics and the empirical wall against which this enterprise shatters itself. Regarding hospitality, but also sovereignty, equality, freedom, justice, Derrida cannot but conclude with what he says, not incorrectly, about democracy: “It is not cer-tain that ‘democracy’ is a political concept through and through.”58 In other words, political concepts and practices have a philosophi-cal basis and import, and are never “purely” political – who could argue otherwise? But the problem is that Derrida no longer acknowl-edges their political aspect, but only sees the philosophical one. He ends up accusing them of an imaginary crime, that of wanting to be purely political and to throw off philosophy altogether. Yet while no political theorist can expect to forget about the latter, it is much more common for philosophers to be satisfied with a strictly philo-sophical approach. Derrida takes the high road, and tries to remind us of philosophy in a place where, in fact, no one had forgotten about it. In the final analysis he overloads these concepts and makes it impossible to fulfill Rawls’s political motto: “Stay on the surface, philosophically speaking.”59

Conclusion

It is by returning once more to Ricoeur that we are able to pick up Derrida’s path again. Commenting on the text Derrida dedicated to unconditional forgiveness, Ricoeur asks a simple question: “Is there some forgiveness for us?”60 Can it still be forgiveness, political ethics for us, as historical human communities? This democratic and pragmatic “us” that Derrida constantly wishes to interrupt in the

57. Derrida, Paper Machine, 127.58. Derrida, Rogues, 39.59. John Rawls, “Justice as Fairness: Political Not Metaphysical,” Philosophy and Public

Affairs, 14(3): 230.60. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer

(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), 469.

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very name of democracy, must, however, be able to persist, and the “mad” gestures (forgiveness, hospitality) are always already institu-tionalized. Realigning ethics with the regime of exchange,61 taming the aporia by resolving dilemmas; such is Ricoeur’s task, the task of the political philosopher. Exchange does not exhaust the possibilities of the event, the social bond does not prevent openness towards the stranger; mutuality as reciprocity and recognition can overcome the strict opposition between the calculable and the incalculable,62 the “we” can escape the “compulsion of sovereignty,” i.e. the powerful desire for the selfsame, for the identity of selfhood.63 Once again, Ricoeur attempts to demonstrate that it is possible for gestures to become institutions, without thereby wholly betraying them. More attentive to the prose of the just than to the poetics of the event, Ricoeur holds on to both without letting himself be carried away by philosophical trope, and thus succeeds in becoming part of politi-cal theory. Derrida, undoubtedly too accustomed to his totalizing readings of the philosophical tradition, approaches political thought with the same attitude.64 It is perhaps for this reason that there is in fact no political turn in Jacques Derrida, because he never abandons the quasi-metaphysical concerns that the political theorist wishes to leave behind. Of course, who can deny that there is philosophy in democracy? Or goodness in the just? Or metaphysics in politics? However, in the final analysis, political theory does not respond to the demand for unconditional justice, but rather to the contingent and transactional deliberations of politics. Richard Rorty states the same thing, if in a more polemical manner: “I see ethics and politics – real politics as opposed to cultural politics – as a matter of reaching accommodation between competing interests, and as something to be deliberated on in banal, familiar terms.”65

61. See the discussion on the request for forgiveness (Ricoeur, Memory, 478). See also Gaëlle Fiasse, “Paul Ricoeur et le pardon comme au-delà de l’action,” Laval théologique et philosophique 63(2): 363-376.

62. On this point see Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition and Antoine Garapon, “Justice et reconnaissance,” Esprit, March/April 2006, 231-248.

63. Derrida, Rogues, 142.64. In this way, Johann Michel opposes the “shattered Hegelianism” of Ricoeur (who

mourns the absolute knowledge) to the “inverted Hegelianism” of Derrida (“‘totalizing’ the history of thought under the meta-concept of presence”) in “Herméneutique et déconstruction,” 214.

65. Richard Rorty “Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism,” in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Routledge, 1996), 17.

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Ricoeur defined utopias as seeking to “expose the undeclared gains of authority and unmask the pretentions of all systems of legiti-macy.” Even if Derrida defends himself repeatedly from this claim, his work is shot through by this ambition. His utopia is for politics to be able to suspend domination – sovereignty in all forms – with-out deferring its actions; that it be capable of both philosophical prudence and decisive courage. It thus resides less in the propositions he puts forward (the democracy to come or unconditional hospital-ity) than in his very manner of engaging in political philosophy. ◆

Benjamin Boudou is a PhD student at the Sciences Po CEVIPOF and a former Fox Fellow at Yale. His thesis, “Democracy and the Stranger: Theory and Practice of Hospitality,” deals with contemporary theories of the justification of borders, evaluated in the light of a political anthropol-ogy and sociology of hospitality. benjamin.boudou@sciences-po.org

ABSTRACT

The Crossing of the Political: Derrida and Ricoeur between the Purity of Philosophy and the Tragedy of Action

In this paper I compare and critically examine the political thought of Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Derrida. I analyze their specific manners of combining phi-losophy, ethics, and political theory. Despite their striking proximity on certain issues and shared mistrust of purely procedural and liberal definitions of politics, they profoundly disagree on the meaning of justice and sovereignty. The ethical excess resulting from the unconditional nature of Derrida’s “event” is radically op-posed to Ricoeur’s concern for the “institution” and social cohesion. The concept of hospitality, tackled late in the careers of both writers, illustrates this opposition. Finally, I argue for a political theory approach to Derrida while calling for a cau-tious use of his primarily philosophical concepts.

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