Came across this article entitled "Contretemps: Derrida's Ante and the Call for Marxist Political Philosophy," by a certain Richard Joines. Not sure when the article was written. "Specters of Marx" came out in 1994, and "Marx and Sons" came out in 2002 . . . . It's all a bit too conspiratorial for my taste . . . . Even so, I've always thought that Derrida & L Strauss had an affinity (though for different reasons than Joines advances)
Here's the key passages:
There can be no repoliticization if there is no clear and existential demarcation between friends and enemies. Derrida qua Schmittian knows that in a depoliticized world, nothing is very interesting--the world is full of mere "entertainment." Derrida, following Schmitt's counsel (who in his own way follows Nietzsche's), attempts to "raise the ante" and to make "things more interesting" by following the advice of "Love your enemies." However, it is difficult to love a weak or incompetent enemy who does not realize war is being waged upon him. It may be easy to battle a confused enemy or to win a war against a divided state, but Derrida is not interested in what is easy. It is nobler to fight a serious opponent: win or lose, the battle proves there are still meaningful political antitheses over which people are willing to kill or die. Derrida, however, is in an embarrassing position: he has to tell his Marxist opponents they have been routed in a battle they neither knew was going on (at least since the publication of Specters of Marx) nor whose rules of engagement they understood. Derrida's book, "initially a lecture, delivered at a specific moment" under conditions not of his choosing, "'took a position' in response to a significant invitation in a highly determinate context," yet virtually no one seems to have understood what Derrida intended to question: the "political," the "philosophical," and their relations to "Marx" ("MS," p. 217).
. . . . .
Derrida's attempt "to reawaken questions mesmerized or repressed" puts him, whether he knows it or not, whether the Marxists who "have never considered Derrida a man of the Right" know it or not, in a hidden dialogue with Leo Strauss. For Strauss, the disasters of modern politics made it necessary to return (a form of repentance) to the noble question form of ancient political philosophy (what is the good? what is the best regime?). He set himself against the base calculative efforts of modern political philosophers who sought to plan human satisfaction on an all-too-human scale and who valued the body and the belly over virtue and the soul.
. . . . .
For the modern many, Marxists included, who assume answers to political things but have forgotten the questions, Derrida's attempt at philosophical repoliticization appears as depoliticization. For Derrida, the theoretical-and-political "disasters" of modernity and Marxism prove the need to return to the question-form of philosophy. They prove the Enlightenment project has failed, and thus dictate the need for a new political thinking (which is, paradoxically, both a return to ancient political practice and stratagems and an "arrivant" from the spectral, indeterminate, yet proleptically-created future). The greatest danger here is that neither Derrida's epigones, who think Derrida's project is about deconstructing texts, nor his foes, who think more or less the same thing, are likely to be in a position to grasp what Derrida intends when speaking of "the repoliticization that I would like to see come about" ("MS," p. 223).
. . . . .
A "Marxist" complaint about Derrida's book is that it avoids class politics. Derrida is again put in the embarrassing position of explaining his silence (though his explanation has its own silence). Derrida notes that he does not believe social class has disappeared, only that the notion of class, or its traditional concepts or criterion, are "problematic," not outdated or irrelevant: "If I had wanted to say that I believed there were no more social classes and that all that struggle over this subject was passé, I would have" ("MS," p. 236). As Strauss writes of Machiavelli,
The rule which Machiavelli tacitly applies can be stated as follows: if a wise man is silent about a fact that is commonly held to be important for the subject he discusses, he gives us to understand that that fact is unimportant. The silence of a wise man is always meaningful. It cannot be explained by forgetfulness. . . . One can express one's disagreement with the common view by simply failing to take notice of it; this is, in fact, the most effective way of showing one's disapproval. (ToM, p. 30)
If Derrida does not mention "class" or any number of topoi deemed crucial for Marxists, he, like Machiavelli, is perhaps suggesting "by this silence that these subjects are unimportant for politics" (ToM, p. 31). By his silence, Derrida indicates, for those with ears to hear, that he finds Marxist common sense about the political to be wrong. The question becomes, if not class, then what? What will be the organizing principle, the thing that binds (fascio) and gives unity to the New International, "which is already a reality" ("MS," p. 239)? If we are to stand up against this New International, we need to hear what is hidden in Derrida's silence.
. . . . .
When all standpoints have equal validity, nothing is of the highest value. What has been misunderstood as "progress" is in fact "nihilism," a process of decadence and loss of faith in any higher goals under the guise of democratic "values:" "What looks to Nietzsche's Dionysian disciples like freedom is to Nietzsche's Apollonian vision amor fati--the Spinozist acceptance of fate, or what we may bluntly call slavery," writes Rosen ("NR," p. 200). The goal of the New International, which is hiding in the light in Politics of Friendship, is the creation of the philosophers of the future (in the present) who can will new values.
. . . . .
Derrida quotes and writes explicitly about Schmitt in Politics of Friendship, but by Specters of Marx and "Force of Law," Schmitt has been so incorporated into Derrida's discourse (or Derrida has been encorpsed by Schmitt) that Derrida does not even mention Schmitt's name. Yet, in "Marx & Sons," Derrida reminds his Marxist interlocutors that the New International is concerned with singular situations (what Schmitt refers to as Ernstfall, extreme cases). In assessing, or judging, those singular situations, "there is, by definition, no pre-existing criterion or absolute calculability" (or as Schmitt says, "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception"16). For Schmitt and Derrida, political decisions are not about parliamentary debates or ballot boxes ("Or that one had to choose: to be 'for' or 'against' Marx, as in a polling booth," Derrida writes ["MS," p. 231]). The New International is not about democracy; it is about fashioning a new prince whose "analysis must begin anew every day everywhere, without ever being guaranteed by prior knowledge" ("MS," p. 239-40).
. . . . .
Lest one have misunderstood Derrida's harping on the "undecidable" all these years as merely a textual or referential problem, Derrida, echoing Schmitt, reminds us, "The 'undecidable' has never been, for me, the opposite of decision: it is the condition of decision wherever decision cannot be deduced from an existing body of knowledge as it would be by a calculating machine" ("MS," p. 240). Or, as Schmitt writes in Political Theology:
The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything: it confirms not only the rule but also its existence, which derives only from exception. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition. (PT, p. 15)
Political decisions partake of the irrational and of the spontaneous, not the calculative. The rule of law, parliamentary debate, and legalistic justice are machines of a State with no sovereign and no ideals. It is this absence that Derrida wishes to fill by his turn to Schmitt and his commitment to repoliticization. If there is no "truth" in a democratic, legislated, majority-ruled (i.e., decadent) world, perhaps a sovereign might rise to make everything new again.
. . . . .
Here's the key passages:
There can be no repoliticization if there is no clear and existential demarcation between friends and enemies. Derrida qua Schmittian knows that in a depoliticized world, nothing is very interesting--the world is full of mere "entertainment." Derrida, following Schmitt's counsel (who in his own way follows Nietzsche's), attempts to "raise the ante" and to make "things more interesting" by following the advice of "Love your enemies." However, it is difficult to love a weak or incompetent enemy who does not realize war is being waged upon him. It may be easy to battle a confused enemy or to win a war against a divided state, but Derrida is not interested in what is easy. It is nobler to fight a serious opponent: win or lose, the battle proves there are still meaningful political antitheses over which people are willing to kill or die. Derrida, however, is in an embarrassing position: he has to tell his Marxist opponents they have been routed in a battle they neither knew was going on (at least since the publication of Specters of Marx) nor whose rules of engagement they understood. Derrida's book, "initially a lecture, delivered at a specific moment" under conditions not of his choosing, "'took a position' in response to a significant invitation in a highly determinate context," yet virtually no one seems to have understood what Derrida intended to question: the "political," the "philosophical," and their relations to "Marx" ("MS," p. 217).
. . . . .
Derrida's attempt "to reawaken questions mesmerized or repressed" puts him, whether he knows it or not, whether the Marxists who "have never considered Derrida a man of the Right" know it or not, in a hidden dialogue with Leo Strauss. For Strauss, the disasters of modern politics made it necessary to return (a form of repentance) to the noble question form of ancient political philosophy (what is the good? what is the best regime?). He set himself against the base calculative efforts of modern political philosophers who sought to plan human satisfaction on an all-too-human scale and who valued the body and the belly over virtue and the soul.
. . . . .
For the modern many, Marxists included, who assume answers to political things but have forgotten the questions, Derrida's attempt at philosophical repoliticization appears as depoliticization. For Derrida, the theoretical-and-political "disasters" of modernity and Marxism prove the need to return to the question-form of philosophy. They prove the Enlightenment project has failed, and thus dictate the need for a new political thinking (which is, paradoxically, both a return to ancient political practice and stratagems and an "arrivant" from the spectral, indeterminate, yet proleptically-created future). The greatest danger here is that neither Derrida's epigones, who think Derrida's project is about deconstructing texts, nor his foes, who think more or less the same thing, are likely to be in a position to grasp what Derrida intends when speaking of "the repoliticization that I would like to see come about" ("MS," p. 223).
. . . . .
A "Marxist" complaint about Derrida's book is that it avoids class politics. Derrida is again put in the embarrassing position of explaining his silence (though his explanation has its own silence). Derrida notes that he does not believe social class has disappeared, only that the notion of class, or its traditional concepts or criterion, are "problematic," not outdated or irrelevant: "If I had wanted to say that I believed there were no more social classes and that all that struggle over this subject was passé, I would have" ("MS," p. 236). As Strauss writes of Machiavelli,
The rule which Machiavelli tacitly applies can be stated as follows: if a wise man is silent about a fact that is commonly held to be important for the subject he discusses, he gives us to understand that that fact is unimportant. The silence of a wise man is always meaningful. It cannot be explained by forgetfulness. . . . One can express one's disagreement with the common view by simply failing to take notice of it; this is, in fact, the most effective way of showing one's disapproval. (ToM, p. 30)
If Derrida does not mention "class" or any number of topoi deemed crucial for Marxists, he, like Machiavelli, is perhaps suggesting "by this silence that these subjects are unimportant for politics" (ToM, p. 31). By his silence, Derrida indicates, for those with ears to hear, that he finds Marxist common sense about the political to be wrong. The question becomes, if not class, then what? What will be the organizing principle, the thing that binds (fascio) and gives unity to the New International, "which is already a reality" ("MS," p. 239)? If we are to stand up against this New International, we need to hear what is hidden in Derrida's silence.
. . . . .
When all standpoints have equal validity, nothing is of the highest value. What has been misunderstood as "progress" is in fact "nihilism," a process of decadence and loss of faith in any higher goals under the guise of democratic "values:" "What looks to Nietzsche's Dionysian disciples like freedom is to Nietzsche's Apollonian vision amor fati--the Spinozist acceptance of fate, or what we may bluntly call slavery," writes Rosen ("NR," p. 200). The goal of the New International, which is hiding in the light in Politics of Friendship, is the creation of the philosophers of the future (in the present) who can will new values.
. . . . .
Derrida quotes and writes explicitly about Schmitt in Politics of Friendship, but by Specters of Marx and "Force of Law," Schmitt has been so incorporated into Derrida's discourse (or Derrida has been encorpsed by Schmitt) that Derrida does not even mention Schmitt's name. Yet, in "Marx & Sons," Derrida reminds his Marxist interlocutors that the New International is concerned with singular situations (what Schmitt refers to as Ernstfall, extreme cases). In assessing, or judging, those singular situations, "there is, by definition, no pre-existing criterion or absolute calculability" (or as Schmitt says, "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception"16). For Schmitt and Derrida, political decisions are not about parliamentary debates or ballot boxes ("Or that one had to choose: to be 'for' or 'against' Marx, as in a polling booth," Derrida writes ["MS," p. 231]). The New International is not about democracy; it is about fashioning a new prince whose "analysis must begin anew every day everywhere, without ever being guaranteed by prior knowledge" ("MS," p. 239-40).
. . . . .
Lest one have misunderstood Derrida's harping on the "undecidable" all these years as merely a textual or referential problem, Derrida, echoing Schmitt, reminds us, "The 'undecidable' has never been, for me, the opposite of decision: it is the condition of decision wherever decision cannot be deduced from an existing body of knowledge as it would be by a calculating machine" ("MS," p. 240). Or, as Schmitt writes in Political Theology:
The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything: it confirms not only the rule but also its existence, which derives only from exception. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition. (PT, p. 15)
Political decisions partake of the irrational and of the spontaneous, not the calculative. The rule of law, parliamentary debate, and legalistic justice are machines of a State with no sovereign and no ideals. It is this absence that Derrida wishes to fill by his turn to Schmitt and his commitment to repoliticization. If there is no "truth" in a democratic, legislated, majority-ruled (i.e., decadent) world, perhaps a sovereign might rise to make everything new again.
. . . . .