Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 40, No.

1, January 2009
KANT AND JEALOUSY IN DERRIDAS GLAS
CHRISTOPHER LAUER
Despite Derridas repeated efforts to distance himself from the network of
philosophical concerns that has traditionally been called ethics,
1
commentators are increasingly recognizing the centrality of ethics in his
thought
2
and in particular the centrality of Kant to his ethical considerations.
3
In his 1993 essay Passions,
4
he criticizes efforts to derive an ethics from
deconstruction, but in the same breath affirms the importance of Kants moral
law even as deconstruction undermines it. There he notes that while the moral
laws very need to be respected submits it to a feeling (Gefhl) and thus
undermines its primacy and autonomy, this does not mean that we should
simply abandon the search for such primacy and autonomy (ON 16). Rather,
it shows that the structural requirement that the moral law be something
necessary also makes it impossible for it to ground itself. Repeatedly finding
this Kantian combination of impossibility and necessity in such phenomena as
friendship, hospitality, and forgiveness, much of Derridas later work is
devoted to exploring the isomorphism of the ethical problems that constitute
Kants legacy.
At a pivotal moment in On Forgiveness, Derrida argues that modern states
jealousy of their own sovereignty poses a serious and continuing impediment
to genuine acts of forgiveness. If true forgiveness opens a space whereby the
one forgiven is no longer defined by her original wrongdoing or indebtedness
to the victim, then it will be disrupted whenever the victim assumes for herself
the absolute right to forgive.
5
Since states inevitably assume such a right in
their dealings with one another, such political interventions into forgiveness as
South Africas Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the French
governments assertion of the imprescriptibility of certain crimes against
humanity will necessarily be inhibited by the jealousy of the actors (OCF
58). To suspend this jealousy, it is necessary also in politics to respect the
secret, that which exceeds the political or that which is no longer in the
juridical domain. This is what I would like to call democracy to come (OCF
55). A great deal of excellent thought has been devoted to understanding what
Derrida means by the phrase democracy to come,
6
but to my knowledge very
little has been devoted to conceiving the jealousy that it is meant to suspend.
This is all the more striking because in Glas Derrida makes the concept of
jealousy a central moment in distinguishing between Kant and Hegel, precisely
because it describes a kind of spacing resistant to reconciliation. In Glas,
jealousy names a movement that entrenches the space between the divine and
the human or the parent and the child precisely through the demand that that
54
space be eliminated. In Derridas account, Kants and Hegels jealous defences
of their positions become irreconcilable in their disputes over whether divine
or human jealousy is to be respected and over the extent to which family life
is essentially jealous. This spatial conception of jealousy, I will contend in this
essay, is useful not only for distinguishing the Kantian and Hegelian
conceptions of religion and family, but also for laying out what is at stake in
Derridas later discussions of morality and lawfulness.
7
Jealousy, I aim to
show, is a name for the inaccessibility at the source of the law and thus
pervades every assertion that duty is grounded in a moral law. But first, since
Glas is sometimes read as a rejection of the very idea of a book,
8
I feel
compelled to defend my choice to make it the object of traditional scholarly
commentary. At the risk of being what Oliver Stones JFK was to Woody
Allens rant on the Warren Commission in Annie Hall a clumsy and
overserious overextension of an essentially contextualized (and ironic)
discussion I undertake this interpretation in all seriousness. The depth and
precision of Derridas argumentation, I hope to show, merits nothing less.
Jealousy as Denial of Spacing
The central moment in Derridas effort to distinguish Kant from Hegel in
Glas appears as a simple pronouncement: Jealousy is at stake here.
9
In the
text itself, Derrida goes further than usual to give this pronouncement its due
spacing. Not only is it set off from the preceding and following paragraphs (the
former of which is itself set off by parentheses), but the text is also internally
spaced, as if such separation could relieve the pressure that each word exerts
on its neighbours. Speaking of Genets Our Lady of the Flowers in the right-
hand column some 150 pages earlier, Derrida has highlighted the importance
of such textual spacing:
Let us space. The art of this text is the air it causes to circulate between its screens [paravents].
The chainings [enchanements] are invisible, everything seems improvised or juxtaposed. This
text induces by agglutinating rather than demonstrating, by coupling and decoupling, gluing
and ungluing [en accolant et en dcollant] rather than by exhibiting the continuous, and
analogical, instructive, suffocating necessity of discursive rhetoric. (G 75b [88b])
While the juxtaposition of Derridas desiderative subjunctive in Let us
space with the textual analysis of Genet would seem to annul the distance
between the two, it also indicates that such spacing cannot help but appear
(and disappear) whenever a reader couples with a writer. Even in emphasizing
the singularity of Genets writing (The art of this text . . .) Derrida insists on
sharing his space, hinting that textual claustrophobia is something they have in
common. Thus it is not too surprising that when Derrida comes to highlight
the role of jealousy in distinguishing two authors he recalls the importance of
textual spacing. Five extra strokes of the spacebar would seem an inadequate
substitute for the airiness that Genet so carefully cultivates, but they at least
call attention to the suffocation risked in drawing too tight an analogy between
55
Hegels dismissal of Kants jealous God and the limitations of Kants ethics in
general. Derrida recognizes that any genuine confrontation between Kant and
Hegel will have to compromise the space that each so jealously guards.
Still, since the ensuing discussion presents a largely continuous and
internally consistent account of this purportedly unbridgeable chasm, the risk
of suffocation is offset by the promise of reconciliation. What is at stake here
most immediately is the difference between Kant and Hegel, Hegels attempt
to banish Kant from any properly philosophical discussion of the absolute. In
the midst of his reading of religion in the third part of Hegels 1830
Encyclopedia, Derrida comes across a passage in which Hegel distinguishes
the revealed (Christian) religion from all prior religions by arguing for the
impossibility of a jealous God (564).
10
One of Hegels primary targets in this
passage is Kants contention that reason must acknowledge that God remains
forever inaccessible to it in order to avoid transcending its own limits. When,
in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, Kant defines Christianity
against the cult as a religion in which It is not essential and hence not
necessary for everyone to know what God does for his salvation,
11
he
explicitly denies that revelation plays any essential role in Christian
religiousness. For Hegel, this amounts to an assertion that God jealously
guards not only His appearance, but the very space in which spirit comes to
know its other. If Gods revelation is in principle beyond the sphere of reason,
then this beyond itself would no longer belong to reason. Jealousy is at stake
in the distinction between the self-sacrifice with which Hegels absolute
spirit gives itself over to its own divinity and the boundaries that Kants reason
imposes on Christian religion.
Though Derrida follows Hegel in linking Kant with the jealous God of
Judaism, he does not begin by setting up a distinction between a jealous Kant
and a forgiving, expansive Hegel. Rather, he finds in Hegel and Kant two
different sorts of jealousy or better, their respective jealousies manifest two
different relations to God. For Hegel, to place God beyond all knowledge is to
cancel the possibility of adequate human knowledge, ensuring that we could
only ever be unfaithful to reason and to Christianity (G 211a [236a]). Derrida
recalls Hegels assertion that Christianity is the culmination of religion
because only it achieves the revelation (Offenbarung) of spirits unity with the
divine (Encyc. 298, 564). Kant fails to grasp the importance of this revelation
because he insists that human reason attains its validity not from God, but from
adherence to (self-imposed) rules. This enlightenment is for Hegel really
blindness, for to claim to found Christianity in reason and to make
nonetheless of nonmanifestation, of Gods being-hidden, the principle of this
religion is (Kant) to comprehend nothing about revelation (G 213a [238a]).
For Hegel, if revelation means anything at all, it must imply the mutual
openness and accessibility the sharing of a common space of God and
56
reason. Hegels critique of Kant is thus the jealous accusation that Kantian
humility is really an attempt to break God and reason apart.
Kant, on the other hand, presents a jealousy on behalf of God Himself.
Defending God from the amorous gaze of reason, he insists that it is God
Himself who wants nothing to do with such reason. Human beings are
equipped with the freedom to posit the practical necessity of such a God, but
not with the intellect to comprehend His existence. Recalling Hegels
statement in The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate that God revealed himself
to the Jews not as truth, but as a command,
12
Derrida draws out the inference:
Kant is Jewish: he believes in a jealous, envious God, who hides and guards
his Da. . . . The God of Kant, death power, would have no living generosity,
first by his zeal to fold back his Da within himself (G 213a [238a]). This God
jealously hides his location, his presence, and thus denies access to the source
of the law (G 214a [239a]).
13
He keeps his Da, his there, infinitely distant
from the space of human reason, forestalling any possibility of reconciling the
human and the divine.
14
Yet this withholding, Derrida argues, cannot simply be dismissed as an
inadequate conception of Gods limitlessness or even as a pre-Christian
account of Gods characteristic limitation. Rather, it pertains, even in Hegels
very dismissal, to the structure of law itself. In showing that Plato and Aristotle
had already recognized the absurdity of a jealous God, Hegel implicitly
acknowledges that the view they reject that of Nemesis, which made the
divinity and its action in the world only a levelling power, dashing to pieces
everything high and great (Enc. 564) is the traditions figure of equality
before the law. For the Nemesis, Derrida reminds us, is not only, for the
Greeks, distributive justice and nomos (share, portion), it is also resentment
before injustice, then envy, jealousy, also shame and punishment. This whole
chain of significations binds together the law and jealousy or resentment, and
in the same stroke a certain Greek, a certain Jew, and a certain Kant (G 213a
[238a-9a]). Equal in their fear before a God who annuls distinctions between
individuals, this certain Greek, certain Jew, and certain Kant acknowledge that
their very recognition of equality can be turned against them. The law, the
father, the God that must be pleased is a God that cannot be known, a nocturnal
God: jealous, dissembling his Da, moral and castrating, giving himself to be
seen, as the galaxy structure, only by scintillating, glimmering, twinkling on
the background of night lighted by a sun that is not seen (G 214a [239a]).
As he will later show at greater length in Before the Law and Passions,
Derrida here observes that in attempting to discount the validity of all but one
interpretation of itself, the law including Kants moral law jealously
guards access to itself.
15
Thus, like the starry sky above to which Kant
compares it in the second Critique,
16
the moral law reveals itself not in its pure,
luminescent self-presence, but with only a glimmering borrowed from another
57
sun. While the moral law inspires deep wonder in the order of the world, it
does so by closing off the origin of this order.
What unites the lawgiver with the God of this certain Jew/Greek/Kant is His
need to hoard His own image: The figure of a father who would not want what
he gives birth to to resemble him (G 213a [239a]). For Hegel, jealousy
contradicts not Gods perfection, but his generativity. Hegel does not reduce
the Kantian, pre-Platonic vision of God as jealous to a crude psychological
explanation for the imperfection of creation, but sees in it a denial of the
possibility that the world could be the same as its ordering principle. It is
contradictory, Derrida takes Hegel to argue, to suppose that the being who
gives all of creation holds something back in this gift, contradictory to accuse
the God who makes the world in His image of jealously guarding His image
(G 214a [239a]). Spirits reconciliation with God requires it to assume that
nothing has been held back from it, that its being is given without the trace of
a grudge.
But in this distinction between Kant and Hegel it would seem that not just
jealousy, but the very faculty of making distinctions is at stake, including the
capacity to distinguish between two philosophers. In Faith and Knowledge,
Derrida asks whether Kants and Hegels preoccupation with revelation
(Offenbarung) ought not to be situated in relation to a more Heideggerian
concern with revealability (Offenbarkeit). To the extent that Hegel maintains
that both Gods presence and His death must be revealed to spirit and to the
extent that Kant claims that this revelation is unnecessary to ground either
practical or theoretical reason, both ignore the questionability of revealability
in general.
17
Both are thus ensnared in the assumption that revelation can only
occur in a space that belongs either to God or to spirit. By calling into question
Hegels assumption that spirits unfolding is a neutral site in which all forms
of thought can encounter one another, Glass discussion of jealousy asks
whether a debate between Kant and Hegel is even possible.
A Speculative mise en scne
At this point in the text of Glas we would seem to be stuck with this space
between Kants and Hegels positions. Kant, on one side, takes any claim to
knowledge about God as transcendent, and Hegel, on the other, takes the belief
in an inaccessible God as defeatist. To bring the two positions into a common
space, Derrida goes beyond the reverent spacing of philosophical commentary
and directs a speculative mise en scne in the hope of bringing the two in
contact. Standing in the way of this contact, Derrida maintains with deliberate
anachronism, is a Freudian interpretation that sees the categorical imperative
as a mere fetish which operates in a compulsive fashion and rejects any
conscious motives (G 215a [241a]). Kant and Hegel can only be freed for
reunion by allowing that Kants moral law operates in the same absolute
58
openness and self-presence that Hegel demands of absolute knowing. As
Derrida imagines the confrontation, Kant would easily grant Freuds claim
that the categorical imperative which Derrida abbreviates IC, ironically
suggesting a here (ici), an immediate presence is purely negative in its
prohibition and that it rejects all natural motives and inclinations, but he would
deny that it is therefore fetishistic. Rather, respect for the moral law entails a
rejection of all finite determinations of God and takes the law as something
that could never be reduced to mere negativity (G 215a [242a]). The law does
not occupy a negative place in the space of reasons activity, but has its own
space withdrawn from the autonomy of reason.
With the laws self-removal firmly established in Kants counter to Freud,
Hegel sees his opportunity and jumps into the fray. Freud is right, Derrida
has Hegel contend, when he speaks of the moral and the Kantian religion;
they remain in finitude, sensible representation, psychologism, fetishism, the
relations of jealousy between the hidden, invisible father and the impotent son;
Kantian religion does not reach the thought of the infinite and of the true
religion (G 215a [242a]). By placing God infinitely beyond the world in
which He is revealed, Kant ensures His finitude. Isolated in His space beyond
this world, His position remains squalid and incomplete. And for Hegel it is
this resignation that the relation of this world to God can only ever be a finite
one that properly defines fetishism. While Kant claims to secure Gods infinity
by removing Him from this world, this necessarily implies a limitation of His
revelation.
Derrida next imagines an escalation of this jealous battle, with Hegel
accusing Kant of a fetishistic separation of the hidden, invisible father and the
impotent son and Kant retorting that Hegels belief in Gods presence in
sensible existence is the true fetishism (G 217a [243a]). In both cases the
accusation is that the other perverts the true openness of genuine love by
fixating on something inessential. Though Kant and Hegel can come together
in their condemnation of fetishism, this union can only be sustained through
the infinite deferral of an agreement on the meaning of fetishism.
True to his faith in dialectic, Hegel attempts one last reconciliation with
Kant by noting their mutual faith in reason and pleading that his conception of
revelation had been misunderstood: Yet you also speak there of a progress of
reason. I do not propose a formal and tautological identification of the
philosophical object and the religious object, but a concrete, historical,
heterological, painstaking, dialectic identification (G 217a [243a]). These
exaggerated claims of fetishism, the imagined Hegel suggests, do neither of us
justice, since they overlook our mutual faith in freedom and the progress of
reason. But unable to maintain absolute magnanimity, he concludes, I do,
without jealousy, to be sure, certainly not, what you should have done (G217a
[243a]). That is, Hegel maintains that only he overthrows the final fetish of
59
placing God beyond this world. Hegels insistence on divine presence does not
result from an a priori desire for God to be near, but from his recounting of
spirits labor to bring itself to the divine the precise effort that Kant
continually presupposes in making reason the progressive faculty of self-
criticism. Far from the rudimentary jealousy of a child threatened by the very
possibility that her parents could have independent lives, this spiritual
movement is the highest form of self-abnegation. With this Derrida gives
Hegel the left columns last word on jealousy, but he leaves the discussion
unresolved, uttering an indifferent In any case (En tous) to return to his main
concern of the place of religion in absolute spirit (G 218a [244a]). So long as
Kant and Hegel jealously guard not only their respective visions of the relation
of God to the world but also their respective definitions of jealousy, Derridas
mise en scne will always fail in its speculative task of bringing them together.
Ultimately, Derrida only decides the matter both for and against Hegel by
putting Hegel to the side entirely. To bring this jealousy back into the Hegelian
fold of absolute knowing, Derrida is forced to step out of the Hegel column.
Just as the discussion of jealousy in Kant and Hegel is winding down to a non-
resolution, it reappears in the right-hand columns discussion of the glas, the
fragility of the bells toll. The same Bataille Derrida accuses of being unable
to step out of dialectical thought is here used to introduce a new, sonorous
version of absolute knowing (G 220-1b [247b]). Perhaps, the next few inserts
suggest, this knowing would take the form not of an organon of philosophical
intuition, but of a (musical) organ, whose horizontal rollers and vertical rods
do not replace sight but limit and shade it like venetian blinds (G 224bi
[251bi]). Derridas word here for venetian blinds is jalousies and to drive
home the link between the absolute knowing of the glas and the earlier, more
sinister discussion of jealousy he asks, What would be as it were the absolute
knowing of glas? and obliquely answers, But absolute knowledge, like (the)
jalousie, is only a piece of machinery, a running-effect [un effet de marche]
(G 225b [251b]).
18
While it purports to be the result of a grand march or
stairway (marche) toward divinity, Hegels absolute knowing is no less a
mechanical production and artifact than the Kantian jealousy against which
Hegel so jealously defends its position. Only by appreciating that jealousy is
necessary and impossible not just in God, but in spirit as well, can absolute
knowing adequately address the Kantian position. A new absolute knowing
would be required such that, simply by twisting the rod of presentation
(Darstellung), its very opacity became the principle of its transparency.
Familial Spacing
Such a non-resolution also plagues Glas other major effort to distinguish
Kant from Hegel, in which, not coincidentally, jealousy also plays a major
role. Given the central role that the family plays in Hegels conception of
60
ethical life (Sittlichkeit), it is not too surprising that Derrida devotes such a
large section of Glas to exploring both its solidity and its vulnerability. But
what ought to give us pause is that Derrida deems it necessary to read Hegels
analysis of the family not simply through its development in the Philosophy of
Right and Jena Philosophy of Spirit but in opposition to Kants anthropology
of the family. This hermeneutical choice is especially noteworthy since
Derrida introduces Kants account by admitting its irrelevance to the Hegelian
discussion of marriage: Against marriages essentiality [under the Hegelian
conception], no consideration on the empiric limitations of freedom can
measure up. So Hegel never takes into consideration Kants whole pragmatic
anthropology, everything in it concerning conjugal agonistics, the struggle for
mastery between husband and wife (G 124a [143a]). Any essential differences
or inevitable conflicts between men and women lie outside of the dialectic of
marriage and thus are irrelevant to Hegels discussion of the family;
everything must happen as if the spouses were of the same sex, were both
bisexual or asexual (G 125a [143a]). For Hegel the matrimonial union
consists not simply of a common space, but of absolute symmetry.
Thus the Hegelian ethical system, no less than his account of revealed
religion, takes itself to be a renunciation of the necessity of jealousy. Whereas
for Kant the institution of marriage only survives because of the mutual
jealousy of a naturally polygamous husband and culturally controlling wife,
for Hegel a true marriage can only be based on mutual affirmation (G 131a
[149a]). The very rigidity of marriage is designed (at least according to
Hegels line of thinking)
19
to ensure a symmetrical space of encounter. An
institution founded in fear of the others escape rather than mutual recognition
belongs to the realm of nature, not the ethical life of spirit. Because he
remained obsessed with this natural jealousy, Kant could not think, did not
begin by thinking the concept marriage. This concept being posited, Hegel on
the contrary wants to deduce its development and not its regression (G 131a
[150a]). But this desire to avoid regressing into natural jealousy itself carries
marriage back into jealousy, for the development of the Hegelian marriage
entails the birth of a child. The free, nonjealous union of husband and wife
only completes its relief (Aufhebung) of their sexual difference in the
conception of the child. This conception, however, immediately spawns new
jealousies, as the mother claims ownership of the child in her womb and the
father guides the childs education to shape him in his own image. For Hegel,
the product of the non-jealous union must turn once again into a subject of
jealousy.
Kant, on the other hand, transforms this initially jealous claim to the child
into something else entirely. Derrida notes the apparent superficiality of Kant
reducing the parents concern for the child to the mere empirical need for
support in their old age, but observes that This derisively empiric explanation
61
nevertheless discovers the essential affect mourning that relates one of
the parents to the child of the other sex from the death of the married partner
(G 132a [150a]). A parent will cling to a child especially one of the
opposite sex not for the jealous goal that the child carry the parents image,
but so that the image of the deceased parent can be let go in the child. With
this apparent oversimplification of the parent-child relationship, Kant points to
something Hegels jealous understanding of this relationship overlooks: no
matter how broadly we understand the term Aufhebung (sublation, relief,
suspension, etc.), the child can never be the complete Aufhebung of its parents
marriage. This is true not merely of an uncharitable translation of Aufhebung
as annulment, since the marriage continues to have its own force and meaning
after the birth of the child, but even if we understand it as elevation, since the
raising of the child does not complete the dialectical work of the marriage.
Since there is always the possibility that one of the parents will have to mourn
the others passing,
20
marriage necessarily involves the continual effort to learn
to leave jealousy behind.
Kant and the Suspension of Jealousy
Kants insistence on the jealousy of law and nonjealousy of mourning thus
provides an important clue for tracking Derridas strongly ambivalent readings
of Kant. The conjunction of necessity and impossibility in Derridas analyses
of forgiveness, hospitality, and friendship mirrors the jealous structure of the
Kantian moral law, which demands that the will be in immediate unity with it
even as it closes off the possibility of this unity. Derrida treats this structure
most memorably in his reading of Kafkas Before the Law, where the laws
gatekeeper denies the protagonist entrance to a door that has been built solely
for him.
21
But at the same time, Kants denial of the openness and symmetry
of familial relations allows for precisely the sort of suspension of jealousy that
forgiveness, friendship, and mourning demand. The very jealousy that blocks
me from sharing my image in full with my offspring is what grants the child
an open space for letting go. While jealousy is paradoxical in that its drive to
eliminate the distance of the other constitutes its ability to reconcile with it, its
suspension of generosity releases the other to be and die.
The promise of such a suspension of jealousy cannot help but haunt
Derridas later ethical writings, for the jealous structure of the law informs the
entire network of ethical discourses concerning hospitality and friendship. In
Passions, Derrida summarizes this connection by criticizing Kants notion
that we are most certain that an action is moral when it contravenes
inclination. Answering Kant, Derrida argues, A gesture of friendship or of
politeness would be neither friendly nor polite if it were purely and simply to
obey a ritual rule. But this duty to eschew the rule of ritualized decorum also
demands that one go beyond the very language of duty (ON 7).
22
It seems,
62
then, that in any number of gestures meant to establish openness to the other,
it is ones duty to suspend duty. Would there thus be a duty not to act
according to duty, as Kant would say (pflichtmssig), nor even out of duty (aus
Pflicht)? In what way would such a duty, or such a counter-duty, indebt us?
(ON 7f). It would ask us, we can answer in light of Glas, to suspend allegiance
to a jealous law that insists that any relation to an other be through it.
Friendship mandates that we not accede to the moral laws jealous insistence
that all friendly relations take place in the space it only provisionally loans us.
Friendship, hospitality, and, ultimately, democracy to come thus call for a
spacing beyond the one demanded by a jealous law or jealous God, but this
ought not to lead us to Hegels jealous demand that we always have a space of
our own for satisfying encounters with the other. This Hegelian demand is no
less jealous or mechanical than the Kantian mediator of a transcendental law,
since it hopes to give itself a mechanism by which the other is to be
encountered.
Curiously enough, it might be Kant himself who gives us the resources for
minding the fissure between himself and Hegel. In Before the Law, Derrida
notes that adherence to the moral law in Kant is not blind and automatic, but
requires an act of imagination. In following the moral law, we act as if the
moral law commanded us without exception. By inserting a space between the
freedom of practical reason and the unconditional command of the moral law,
this as if enables us to reconcile practical reason with an historical
teleology and the possibility of unlimited progress (BL 190).
23
The
imaginations deferral of the promise of an ordered and progressive world
withdraws practical reason from the jealous spacing of the law and frees it to
share a space with the other. Perhaps, Derrida suggests, it is only through this
recognition of the spacing of the moral law that we can suspend its jealousy
and open a space for ethical encounters with the other. This is not, to be sure,
anything like a promise of escape from the structure of jealousy. The openness
of imagination might very well provide insufficient resistance to the
unconditionality
24
of the moral law, and there is no reason to assume that
underlining our hypothetical stance toward it would cancel its jealous force.
But for Derrida, the very possibility of such an imaginative stance reflects the
questionability of jealous spacing. The force of imperatives, whether
categorical like Kants moral law or hypothetical like the demands of
hospitality and forgiveness, cannot simply legislate their universal
applicability, but must release their subjects into an openness to obey.
Penn State University
References
1. In Violence and Metaphysics, for instance, he speaks favourably of Heideggers argument
in the Letter on Humanism that to make ethics primary in philosophy is to fail to let beings
be (Jacques Derrida, Violence and Metaphysics, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan
63
Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978, 137f). Even as late as Rogues, he
dismisses the adjective ethical as inadequate to the responsibility he wishes to describe
(Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005) 145.
2. Robert Bernasconi, for instance, argues that while Derrida is uneasy about making ethics
first philosophy, he is not as convinced as Heidegger that it covers over the most important
questions in philosophy (Bernasconi, Deconstruction and the Possibility of Ethics, [in:
Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida, ed. John Sallis. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987], 130). Geoffrey Bennington goes even further, suggesting
that ethics might nonetheless provide a privileged clue for deconstruction (Bennington,
Interrupting Derrida. (London: Routledge, 2000) 34.
3. Alex Thompson discusses how Kant is exemplary in Derridas later discussions of ethics
and politics in Deconstruction and Democracy. (London: Continuum, 2005), 92f. Sean
Gaston explores the place of Glas in this revaluation of Kant in Derrida and Disinterest,
(London: Continuum, 2005), 61-4.
4. The longer English version appears in On the Name (ON). ed. Thomas Dutoit, trans. David
Wood. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 15. A shorter version appeared in
Derrida: A Critical Reader, ed. Wood. (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1992).
5. Derrida. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (OCF), trans. Mark Dooley and Michael
Hughes. (London: Routledge, 2001), 58.
6. See especially Antonio Calcagno, Badiou and Derrida: Politics, Events and their Time.
(London: Continuum, 2007).
7. For an alternate account of the role of Kant in later Derrida, see Joanna Hodge. Kant Par
Excellence: Introducing Kant after Derrida. (In Kant After Derrida, ed. Philip Rothfield.
Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2003), 6.
8. See, e.g., Geoffrey H. Hartman, Saving the Text, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1981), 2.
9. Il y va de la jalousie (G 211a [236a]). Derrida, Glas. (Paris: ditions Galile, 1974),
translated by John P. Leavey as Glas. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).
Following Leaveys convention in Glassary. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986),
references to Glas first give the English pagination, with an a to indicate the lefthand
column and a b the righthand, and then the French pagination.
10. G. W. F. Hegel, Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 20, edited by Wolfgang Bonsiepen and Hans-
Christian Lucas (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1992), p. 549. Hegels Philosophy of Mind,
trans. William Wallace and A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 297f, hereafter
Encyc.
11. Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings, ed. Allen Wood
and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 72; Kants
Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Kniglich Preuische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter, 1914), vol. 6, p. 52; see Faith and Knowledge, p. 49.
12.
G. W. F. Hegel. Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox. (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1971), 196. Cf. G 34a [42a].
13. Cf. Derrida, Before the Law (hereafter BL), in: Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge.
(London: Routledge, 1992), 190.
14. Derrida reflects on the jealousy of this withholding at greater length in Des Tours de
Babel(In Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar. London: Routledge, 2002). Derrida recalls
Voltaires astonishment that the name Babel, which seems to combine Ba, a word which in
Semitic languages commonly means father, with Bel, God, came to represent a kind of
confusion. For Derrida, this shows that Out of resentment against the unique name and lip
of men, [God] imposes his name, his name of father; and with the violent imposition he
opens the deconstruction of the tower, as the universal language; he scatters this genealogical
filiation (108). This jealousy consists in the use of the name of the father to break apart the
sons: That is what is named here on Babel: the law imposed by the name of God who in one
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stroke commands and forbids you to translate by showing and hiding from you the limit
(132-3).
15. See Bennington, 36 for an analysis of how the law, as text, guards access to itself.
16. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, in: Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary J.
Gregor. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 269.
17. Derrida, Faith and Knowledge, in: Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (London: Routledge,
2002), 53f.
18. For an extended discussion of such mechanism in Hegels thought, see Nathan Ross, On
Mechanism in Hegels Social and Political Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2008).
19. While Derrida devotes some six-and-a-half pages (G 125a-131a [143a-149a]) of the left-
hand column to Kants contrary assumption that natural desires and conflict still reign in
marriage, he never directly refutes Hegels claim that marriage is a neutral space of freedom.
His argument does not concern the success of marriages ostensive effort to neutralize desire,
but merely the jealousy that this aim presupposes.
20. Cf. Derrida, Mmoires for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay et al. (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986), 28f.
21. In Before the Law Derrida thematizes this deferral in terms of the Not yet with which
Kafkas doorkeeper continually defers entrance to the law; Not yet means not now (not at
present), and it further implies the futurity of presencethe coming-into-presence of the
Law, or of the goodness beyond being (Duncan, 19).
22. Olivia Custer reflects more generally on this central dilemma of the space of the law, noting
that if when faced with a decision (a choice) one resorts to having a machine, or the
mechanism of a logical proof, or any [form] of calculation, make the choice, then one is not
actually choosing. In this perspective, trying to know what to do is equally
counterproductive: if knowledge dictates the decision, then there is no decision in the strong
sense, only submission to the dictates of knowledge (Olivia Custer, Kant after Derrida:
Inventing Oneself Out of an Impossible Choice, in: Kant After Derrida, ed. Philip Rothfield
(Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2003), 173.
23. For discussions of the importance of this als ob, see Peg Birmingham, Toward an Ethic of
Desire, in: Feminist Interpretations of Jacques Derrida, ed. Nancy J. Holland
(Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 137 and Stephen Watson,
Regulations: Kant and the End of Metaphysics, in: Deconstruction and Philosophy, ed.
John Sallis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 80. Derrida reconsiders this als
ob relation to the calculability of reason in Rogues (cited above) 133f.
24. In the epistolic afterword to Limited Inc. Derrida describes his ambivalence to
unconditionality, noting that there is something unconditioned about the drive to deconstruct
but cautioning that Kants conception of unconditionality itself calls for deconstruction.
Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., trans. Samuel Weber (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern
University Press, 1988), p. 153.
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