The New Constellation by Bernstein Richard J

Author:Bernstein, Richard J.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-7456-6567-2
Publisher: Wiley

Derrida’s essay is a forceful, passionate, unequivocal condemnation of apartheid – “Racism’s Last Word.” But no text of Derrida is simply univocal. Not only can one discern in this text a subtext which is applicable to the Holocaust – especially when he echoes the Jewish lament in the phrase “Do not forget apartheid” but the theme of the exile who bears witness is self-referential. For the “position” that Derrida himself most frequently “takes” is that of the exile bearing witness. A further reason why Derrida’s texts “speak” to those who have been excluded and exiled – whether Jews, Blacks, women29 (for all their differences) – is because he writes with enormous sensitivity and discernment about the violence done to those who have been exiled and condemned to the margins.

In his interpretation of the Tower of Babel, which can be read as a parable of the “history of the West,” he writes:

In seeking to “make a name for themselves,” to found at the same time a universal tongue and a unique genealogy, the Semites want to bring the world to reason, and this reason can signify simultaneously a colonial violence (since they would universalize their idiom) and a peaceful transparency of the human community. Inversely, when God imposes and opposes his name, he ruptures the rational transparency but interrupts also the colonial violence or the linguistic imperialism.30

Here, too, as in his critique of the metaphysics of presence, Derrida’s metaphorics reveal his ethical-political orientation; “colonial violence” and “linguistic imperialism” inform his reading of the Tower of Babel.

There is still another important play of the motif of the exile. For we can ask, what is the relation of the exile to that from which it is exiled? Whenever Derrida gives a microanalysis of a binary opposition, he seeks to show how the “opposing” terms – despite the attempt to secure “rigid” boundaries – nevertheless mutually implicate each other. So not only is the “position” of the exile dependent on that from which it is exiled, but the exile as a “parasite” lives on and in its “host.” Nowhere is this “reciprocal” bonding more evident than in Derrida’s critique of metaphysics and logocentrism. At times, Derrida’s rhetoric would lead us to believe that we can once and for all make a total break or rupture with the metaphysical tradition. This is the way in which many of his followers and critics have interpreted him. (With this reading there is a curious parallel with the claim made by logical positivists when they announced that we are “now” in the enlightened position of being able to completely dispense with metaphysics.) But Derrida repeatedly tells us that such a total break does not make any sense.

There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to shake metaphysics. We have no language – no syntax and no lexicon – which is foreign to this history; we can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest.

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