a fabric, this is an understanding of “textuality” that Derrida develops from Edmund Husserl’s work, considering an object of enquiry not only as an object in and of itself but as part of a broader fabric of (non)discursive forces.14 To deconstruct an aspect of the “text” is, thus, effectively to unravel the entirety of this textile, purposefully cutting into and through its various constituent parts, layers, seams, etc. in order to inspect forensically the very fibers of its being.
Derrida’s deconstructive intervention is therefore a cutting into “context,” doing so in such a manner that he moves into the “text”—as Critchley and Kearney observe—“via an analysis that is at once historical, contextual, and thematic, to bring out the logic of the concept.”15 This movement, or “conceptual genealogy,”16 is what I present here in Benjaminian terms, seeking to understand how the “pearl” that the metaphorical “pearl diver” has retrieved and—“resuscitated” in Arendt’s own Benjaminian language—has come to be formed at the bottom of the ocean in the first place.17 When thinking about cosmopolitanism and forgiveness as “pearls,” for instance, it is not only interesting to contemplate the genealogical narratives of these notions, but also to consider the broader systems of meaning that inform how such “pearls” presently appear and exist to us as valuable entities. To think deconstructively is thus to begin to understand that the very possibility of the existence of “pearls” is dependent on the seeming impossibility of an irritant—usually a parasite and not the proverbial grain of sand—becoming enveloped by nacre and “crystallized” into a thing of luster and value. In the words of Nicholas Royle, deconstruction is “the experience of the impossible; what remains to be thought; a logic of destabilization always already on the move in ‘things themselves’; [. . .] a theoretical and practical parasitism or virology; what is happening today in what is called society, politics, diplomacy, economics, historical reality, and so on: the opening of the future itself.”18 This experience of thinking the impossible—or of the possibility of something like a pearl becoming possible in terms of its impossibility—is deconstruction, which is the very “performative interpretation” that realizes this conceptual dynamic and allows us to understand the broader context of this entity’s existence in today’s world. Thus, when Critchley and Kearney write about how deconstruction is a “concrete intervention in contexts,” they are describing a foray into an all-encompassing “text” through a study of particular “things”—or “pearls”—whose history and meaningfulness have been shaped by the interplay of the (non)discursive, (non-)present forces that inform their worldly existence.
In addition to the ways in which deconstruction is an “intervention in contexts,” Critchley and Kearney—as part of their introductory remarks to On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness—also note that this form of “ruthless criticism” is “governed by an undeconstructable concern for justice.” Though this is a conceptualization of justice which has notable affinities to the hyper-ethical thought of Emmanuel Levinas, it is foremost necessary to note that the possibility of acting justly can only be said to take place during instances of sheer “undecidability.” For Derrida, “undecidability” is associated with the paralyzing experience of not knowing what to do when we are forced to think and act in the face of the impossible, when no rules or formulas can be applied to address a well-defined “problem”: this is an “experience” which is “heterogenous, foreign to the order of the calculable and the rule, [but] is still obliged [. . .] to give itself up to the impossible decision.”19 Such an experience is characteristic of the aporetic dynamics of (im)possibility ever at play in notions like cosmopolitanism and forgiveness. Having written extensively on the notion of a “problem,” Derrida puts this word “in tension with” the Greek word, “aporia.”20 Where a “problem” is a “prosthesis that we put forth in order to represent, replace, shelter, or dissimulate ourselves, or so as to hide something unavowable,” an “aporia” is a matter of “not knowing where to go,” an experience of impossibility that “separates us in the very place where it would no longer be possible to constitute a problem.”21 The characteristic experience of the aporia is the “non-passage,” of not knowing what to do, and it is “the point where the very project or problematic task becomes impossible and where we are all exposed, absolutely without protection, without problem [. . .] that is to say [. . .] incapable of sheltering ourselves behind what could still protect the interiority of a secret.”22 Thus, to think deconstructively about notions—for instance, cosmopolitanism and forgiveness—is to attend directly to the undecidable relations of (im)possibility that structure particular ideas, words, concepts, themes, and so on; these are the conceptual dynamics that gave rise to the “mad” experience of the aporia—a type of “madness of the impossible”—that engenders the ethical demand to think and act more justly in the world.23
We may be justified, perhaps, in wondering how the experience of undecidability is a matter of “justice.” We might ask how, for instance, Derrida’s understanding of the experience of the impossible possibility gives rise to the sense of responsibility that leads him to believe that “deconstruction is justice”?24 How does a Derridean approach to deconstruction act for the sake of justice? Though these questions take root in various places throughout Derrida’s corpus, his responses to them are fundamentally shaped by his reading of Levinas’s work (notably in his essay “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’”25 ), with a Levinasian notion of ethicality directly informing the sense of responsibility that powers Derridean deconstruction. Critchley, too, in Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas and Contemporary French Thought (1999), investigates the relationship between the work of Derrida and Levinas:
Derrida paradoxically defines justice as an experience of that which we are not able to experience, which is qualified as “the mystical,” “the impossible,” or “aporia” [. . .] justice in an “experience” of the undecidable. However, and this is crucial, such an undecidable experience of justice does not arise in some intellectual intuition or theoretical deduction, rather it always arises in relation to a particular entity, to the singularity of the other [. . .] that is to say, justice arises in the particular and non-subsumptive relation to the Other, as a response to suffering that demands an infinite responsibility.26
Here, Critchley highlights Derrida’s theoretical indebtedness to Levinas, a thinker known for his idiosyncratic notion of alterity and his understandings of ethics as first philosophy. Critchley draws our attention to the ways in which a Derridean understanding of undecidability—in its “relation to a particular entity, to the singularity of the other”—is shaped by a Levinasian notion of otherness, whereby—for Levinas—the “face” of the Other is that which “governs me, whose infinity I cannot thematize and whose hostage I remain.”27 This is an ethically charged conceptualization of alterity, one which Critchley suggests generates a “pre-reflective sentient disposition towards the Other’s suffering that [forms] a basis for ethics and responsibility.”28 This is an ethic that Derrida carries into his approach to deconstruction; specifically, it is an Other-oriented sense of ethics that forms the beating heart of his notion of justice.
Differing from the sense of justice associated with the law (as droit), the justice of Derridean deconstruction aligns with Levinas’s notion of la droiture de l’accueil fait au visage,29 or—as translated by Derrida—“the equitable honoring of faces.”30 Though Derrida’s translation of this excerpt is sometimes contested,31 this is a conceptualization of justice animated by an infinite responsibility to the (unknown) Other, a form of concern for a singular being who is always—though this figure might not be present in the world—owed respect and an equity of treatment. This is an obligation to the ipseity of the Other—someone whose appearance Derrida describes in Levinasian terms as the “arrival” of “God”32 —that he associates with our movement toward and through the aporetic experience engendered during moments of undecidability, which is to say, an injunction to extend as far as humanly possible our care, concern, love, and so on to all whom appear before us. Informed by this infinite, unceasing demand to act responsibly in the “face” of the (unknown) Other, deconstruction is thus—arguably—a characteristically Other-centric form