Jacques Derrida by Hobson Marian

Author:Hobson, Marian.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Singularity and the Law

What I have called the strange attractor acts as a kind of law; it puts the ‘I’ at the end of a process, either as recipient (dative, indirect object) or as accused (accusative, direct object) (see, for instance, ‘The deaths of Roland Bardies’). The gift has words like ‘demand’ (exiger), ‘is necessary’ (falloir), ‘oblige’, used of it (‘At this moment...’). A law generalizes the singular: yet in Kafka’s Vor dem Gesetz (Before the Law) the force of law is singularizing: ‘This door was only meant for you’ says the door keeper to the protagonist at the end. In that, it is ‘uniquely identifying’ and thus acts like a proper name. Like the gift, it creates its destination, by a singular application. Derrida’s work on Kafka’s fable joins problems of ‘antepredicative’ judgements to questions about the nature of ethics. The title ‘Fore judgements’ points to the difficulties which have arisen when quantification is attempted in any logic which has not already set up distinct objects over which to quantify (epistemological and deontological or temporal areas, see notes 25, 55). This is a complex allusion both to the Kafka title and to its own opposition to the canonic predicative logical form ‘S is P’ (Pré, 93), where pre-existing subject and predicate are joined in a synthesis. For in Fregean terms, in a work of fiction the proposition’s way of describing the objects of judgement specifies them. (Derrida begins in fact with a discussion of the singularity now considered – a view he holds at arm’s length, but does not develop – to constitute a work of literature, a fiction where, precisely, names have senses but no reference.)67

Elsewhere, Derrida links such a law into a widening of the notion of ‘ethics’ and of responsibility, a refusal of it as a neatly presented philosophical realm. For the universality of the law has to face the ‘singularité de la venue de l’autre’ –

je dirais que l’ouverture, ou l’attente, une certaine soumission, une certain fidélité à la venue, chaque fois, de l’autre singulier, a une dimension qui ne peut pas se laisser convenir dans ce qu’on appelle le domaine de l’éthique.

(ALT, 71)

The singularity of the coming of the other... I would say that the opening or expectation, a certain submission, a certain faithfulness to the coming, each time, of the singular other, has a dimension that can’t be brought into what is called the domain of ethics.

(my translation)

and Derrida suggests both how Kant tends to inscribe this singularity into what is generalizable, via a calculation (ALT, 72), and yet gives a strange status to the example, the singular used as generally valid (Pré, 108). The law specifies its destination: but what then is its right to judge? ‘The law came, and I died’, St Paul wrote. It is both forbidden and enjoined – ‘terrifiant double bind’ (Pré, 121); ‘la loi procède ďun tout autre (la chose) qui ne demande rien... demandant tout et rien, la chose place le débiteur... en situation ďhétéronomie constante’ (‘the law proceeds from something quite different which asks for nothing.

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