Jacques Derrida, bad boy of philosophy, once suggested that ‘deconstruction is justice’. This downright identification of his radical method of reading texts with one of the most important concepts for our social existence may strike some as self-inflating overstatement. But he’s right. If we can oppose justice to law—a worldly “rightness” to a constructed, linguistic rule—then deconstruction is the mode of philosophy, the intellectual mood, which runs most parallel to justice.
I begin this essay by briefly tracing an outline of deconstruction as both a textual process and an ethical project which seeks to excavate the hidden Other. I then describe Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s transposition of deconstruction into the political register with her “politics of the open end”, a synthesis of feminist marxist concerns of the solidarity of oppressed groups with a deconstructive “safeguard” against the exclusion of alterities. I then consider an objection by Gillian Rose that any politics based on deconstruction leads to political quietism by its wholesale condemnation of power. I argue both that her account of law is deficient and that she has mischaracterised deconstruction as a purely negative process. I demonstrate the affirmative side to deconstruction (reconstruction) with reference to Spivak and Frantz Fanon.
1.
Deconstruction, Derrida insists, is first and foremost concerned with the other: ‘Deconstruction is not an enclosure in nothingness, but an openness towards the other.’ (Deconstruction and the Other 173)
However, in this quotation Derrida is already on the defensive against those who would characterise his philosophy as nihilistic or destructive, a reputation he garnered early in his career with publication in 1967 of three books: Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology and Speech and Phenomena. In all three works, he repeatedly insists on the impossibility of stable concepts and meaning within language. His core insight is that language and the world are mismatched: the world is definite, but language admits no definitive sentences; declarative sentences—that is, sentences about the world—are always in quotation marks.
Derrida uses the term differance to suggest these kind of considerations. In French, as in English, the term forms a pun on “difference” and “deferment”, indicating that all signs differ from what they mean (what they sign differs from what they signify), and all signs continually defer meaning to yet another sign (to give a definition of a sign, one is presented with yet more signs). Deconstruction, as a linguistically embedded process, reveals differance within a text, showing how, despite an author’s intentions, even the most formally set-out arguments “fixing” concepts as clearly as possible are ultimately doomed to fail since the identities and presences they rely on are either unstable or completely absent. Since all it takes is to reveal what is already at play within the text, the text can be said to be in a process of auto-deconstruction.
But, true to Derrida’s claim at the beginning of this section, there is more than simply a linguistic side to deconstruction. Similar to other French post-structuralists of his time—for example, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze—Derrida is concerned with difference, alterity, and the other. Important questions for all three are: why are we so preoccupied with identity, truth, stability, and the self? Are these categories even tenable—that is, do they themselves have stable identities? And what work do they do for our ethics?
Derrida takes a different path into these questions than either Foucault or Deleuze, with important consequences for his resultant ethics. Deleuze, working on the level of concepts, is guilty in Derrida’s eyes of writing a “philosophy of presence”: that very writing which attempts to pin down concepts out there, ignoring or denying the slippage between signifier and signified. For Foucault, however, the other is immediately present, there in the world, seen. This determinacy sits on the right side of the world/language divide for Derrida, but still makes a mistake: the other which is seen—the one opposed to the self—cannot be the true other. The binary opposition between Self and Other falsely assumes the stable identities of each, which is impossible. No, there is a third term: the true other who is absent and overlooked—the other in the gap between Self and Other. It is these gaps between things, between identities, which Derrida’s philosophy is concerned with. Deconstruction, through the revealing of differance within apparently solid binary oppositions, recognises the unseen other—the third term in the self–other binary.
2.
Taking Derrida’s deconstruction from its linguistic stage, with all its ethical potential, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak produces a radical politics based on difference and alterity. In her essay Can the Subaltern Speak? Spivak applies a marxist understanding of the stratification of a society’s population along socio-economic lines to seek out and define a political project around an other which has fallen into the gaps between things.
The term ‘subaltern’ has a history rooted in the British imperial army to describe a soldier in a subordinated position, originally a junior officer. (Leitch et al. 2194) Antonio Gramsci, however, appropriated the term to describe status of “the native” in a colony; the subaltern is thrice excluded: politically, socially and geographically. These two origins hold significant resonance for Spivak in describing the position of “native” women in British India during and after colonial rule. It is the female subaltern in a (post)colonial society which Spivak identifies with the other uncovered by deconstruction.
In the essay, Spivak asks whether the Eurocentric Subject can even hear the subaltern—ultimately answering with a resounding “no”: no matter what politics, if it is based on a philosophy of presence, the subaltern will remain necessarily mute given their political, social and geographic exclusion. It is only a politics with a deconstructive element which holds out hope of retrieving the subaltern, setting them on the road to polity. Leitch et al. note that
‘her restless critiques connect directly to her ethical aspiration for a “politics of the open end,” in which deconstruction acts as a “safeguard” against the repression or exclusion of “alterities”—that is, people, events, or ideas that are radically “other” to the dominant worldview.’ (2193)
This “open end” of her political project is exactly the place where deconstruction is performing its role of justice.
3.
I will now consider an objection to the current course of argument. Perhaps it is argued that we need to balance a Derridean/Spivakian ‘politics of the open end’—taken as a purely negative project to protect against the supposedly “rational” abuse of power—with a positive project of just uses of power; the argument would go that the former without the latter leaves us politically immobile.
Gillian Rose in Mourning becomes the Law performs such a criticism. She is responding ‘in the wake of deconstruction and post-modernism,’ against the condemnation of power as such. (20) In her argument, Rose considers a painting by Poussin called Gathering the Ashes of Phocion, based on Plutarch’s Life of Phocion. Plutarch’s story has important parallels to Antigone—civil disobedience of a woman against an unjust state decree preventing the proper burial of her male loved one—and yet differs in an important way: whereas Creon stands for the state as such, and Antigone for the private representative of divine justice against the transgression of the mortal state upon divine territory, Phocion’s wife is portrayed in mourning against a backdrop of ‘magnificent, gleaming, classical buildings’ which Rose argues ‘convey no malignant foreboding’. (25–6) In fact, ‘they present the rational order which throws into relief the specific act of injustice perpetrated by the current representatives of the city’. (26) That is, the separation between the state as an ideal and any particular instance of the state makes all the difference: there is nothing intrinsically unjust about law—although of course it may become perverted in a particular application.
Moreover, Rose says that
‘[t]o see the built forms themselves as ciphers of the unjust city has political consequences: … it ruins the possibility of political action.’ (26)
Thus she runs together the possibility of a just polis with the possibility of political action. The tension portrayed by Poussin between the rational city (for Rose symbolised by Athens) and the loving city (symbolised by Jerusalem) evokes a third city: the just city—suggestively, Rome. This third city ‘gives meaning to both’ other cities; (26) it is the one which Athens’ former inhabitants, disillusioned with the abuses of rational power in the name of “knowledge”, ‘carry along in their souls … on a pilgrimage to the New Jerusalem’. (21) For Rose, it is the promise of an ideal law which provides justice.
4.
But Rose has a problem. The third city is by her own admission one of ‘capitalist private property’ that ‘separates each individual into a private, autonomous, competitive person, … a phantasy life which effectively destroys the remnant of political life.’ (21–2) This is surely undesirable, even in the ideal.
The flaw was in the beginning to assume the process of deconstruction to be purely negative. But deconstruction also has affirmative ambitions. In Derrida’s own words:
‘Rather than destroying, [for deconstruction] it was also necessary to understand how an “ensemble” was constituted and to reconstruct it to this end.’ (Derrida, “Letter to a Japanese Friend” 272)
Thus a vital part of deconstruction is the reconstruction of the text with the revealed inner workings intact.
Indeed, Spivak affirms the notion of deconstruction as allowing more than the mere recognition of the mute other: ‘[S]ubalterns exists, to some extent, outside of power’ (Leitch et al. 2194) which is why, under a Foucauldian lens, they stand in such an ambiguous relationship to subjectification in discourse. By recognising them, writing them into discourse with deconstruction (or if you like, observing their being-written-in by the text’s autodeconstruction), they enter into the fields of power: they become players in the postcolonial game. In the revised and expanded version of her essay, included as the third chapter in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Spivak writes:
‘When a line of communication is established between a member of subaltern groups and the circuits of citizenship or institutionality, the subaltern has been inserted into the long road to hegemony.’ (Spivak, Critique 310)
And the preceding is not an attempt to whitewash their own narratives into oblivion, instead it takes, as Spivak does in Critique, the Euro-centric Subject’s Reason and applies it to itself as a form of self-knowledge. That is, given the game of postcolonial Western “Reason”, we can play it out via deconstruction to level the playing field, and in so doing we define a new, fairer game.
We can see the affirmative aspect of deconstruction as justice in another example. In Black Skin White Masks, Frantz Fanon argues that the black man in a colonial or postcolonial society is boxed-in and objectified by white ontology; this ontology does not allow him, as black Other, to pose any resistance to the white Self, thereby foreclosing the possibility of any development of either position. It is this static, pseudo-ontology that Fanon has in mind when he says that ‘every ontology is made unattainable in a colonised and civilised society’. (77) He is referencing Hegel on the necessity of resistance between Self and Other in order for any distinction to be made between them, and any historical development of either position to be possible.
Deconstruction helps undo this ontological stalemate, allowing for a proper encounter between the white Self and the black Other as impediment. Deconstruction, then, can act in a meta-judicial role for Hegel’s account of justice: deconstruction helps undo the ontological stalemate in a colonised society, allowing for a proper encounter between the white Self and the black Other as impediment.
* * *
Derrida must surely be right when he claims that ‘deconstruction is justice.’ Through both the negative quality of resistance to unjust law, and the positive quality of retrieving the repressed or excluded other, deconstruction truly is justice.
Cornell, Drucilla, et al., editors. Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. Routledge, 1992.
Derrida, Jacques. “Deconstruction and the Other.” Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers, edited by Richard Kearney, New York UP, 1995, pp. 107–26.
———. “Letter to a Japanese Friend.” Translated by David Wood and Andrew Benjamin. A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, edited by Peggy Kamuf, Columbia UP, 1991, pp. 269–76.
———. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, John Hopkins UP, 1976.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann, Paladin, 1968.
Leitch, Vincent B. et al., editors. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 1st ed., Norton, 2001.
Rose, Gillian. Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation. Cambridge UP, 1996.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, Columbia UP, 1994, pp. 66–111.
———. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Harvard UP, 1999.