Openness to the other generates violence

If Derrida’s uncovering of inherent contradictions and originary violence at the heart of the human condition rules out normative recourse to the notion of performative contradiction, it may also suggests a way out. For the point of insisting on aporias and (not primarily physical but ‘originary’) violence is not a postmodern pleasure in paradoxes, or, even worse, a gay and irresponsible nihilism. Rather, the point is to complicate ethical life beyond the (always too quick) demands of good conscience, to demand that one question oneself while or before questioning others, to insist on the tragic dimension of political life and the need to negotiate ultimately irreconcilable obligations.42 Thus, in an effort to defend Derrida’s normative claims, we could consider the political analysis in terms of the promise, différance, iterability, etc., as outlining an ethics and a politics of what Derrida, in “Violence and Metaphysics,” called the “lesser violence.”43 The difficulties of first defining and then measuring violence are, of course, enormous, especially in light of Derrida’s account of originary violence, and the aporia of undecidability. Provided these difficulties could somehow be met, and further presupposing that unnecessary violence is to be avoided, the attempt to close horizons of the future – that is, to establish a political identity devoid of the need for a repetition from the future and, thus, political (democratic and open-ended) negotiation – could be shown to be needlessly violent, given that identity and future horizons cannot ever be closed. The passage from a quasi-transcendental account to normative claims would then consist in the idea that we ought to refrain from trying to do what is quasi-transcendentally impossible (e.g., a closed political field, identity without relation to otherness), for the attempt to accomplish the impossible would produce “absolute evil” or the worst violence.44 In other words, quasi-transcendental impossibilities only call for their recognition in view of a politics of the lesser violence. I cannot be certain that Derrida would subscribe to this argument, though it has been advanced, and attributed to Derrida, by some of his commentators,45 and can be reconstructed from several Derridean passages. We should not underestimate the difficulties of this consequentialist46 argument, nor should we be mistaken about its scope, about what it can and cannot justify. While it can justify the call for a recognition of originary violence, aporias, and contradictions – aporias that result precisely from openness at the quasi-transcendental level – in order to help reduce violence and invent a new relation to the singular situation, it cannot, I believe, justify the normative claim that this reduction of violence is, in all contexts, achieved by unconditional hospitality and openness to the future to come. Such a claim cannot be decided universally in theory, as Derrida appears to suggest when he names unconditional hospitality a “regulative idea.”47 Let me explain why a universal openness to the future to come and to the personal other does not follow, and why we ought to distinguish here between this normative openness, and justifiable openness as an awareness or recognition of aporias. According to the second argument, it seems, openness to the future and to the other is normatively required because it reduces violence in all contexts. However, both structural considerations regarding futural openness as well as unconditional hospitality, and pragmatic considerations regarding the singularity of the situation lead us to doubt this universality. Not only conditions placed on the other, but also unconditional hospitality can lead to unavoidable violence in breaking with conditional and juridicalized hospitality, and in its tendency to undermine itself. For this reason, it is doubtful that the (quasi-transcendentally necessary) openness that characterizes subjectivities and the political field can give rise to the Kantian ‘regulative idea’ of unconditional hospitality, and that this idea can universally orient, in what Derrida calls a “progressive movement,” the conditions and limits placed on openness to the other.48 If ‘progress’ means, in line with this interpretation, the reduction of violence, it cannot be guaranteed in advance for all contexts that the violence resulting from unconditional hospitality is less than the one resulting from conditional hospitality, laws, institutions, rights, and so on. As Derrida indicates at times, the lesser violence can largely be determined only after the fact, après coup, after an institution has been inaugurated or a decision made. This uncertainty follows precisely from the ineluctable openness and incalculability of the future on which he insists: it is obviously paradoxical to suggest openness to the future beyond expectation as a norm on the basis of the calculation of the future effects of an action. As Derrida himself admits, whether deconstructive affirmation of the future to come ‘succeeds’ “could never be the object of knowledge or of certainty.”49 Such inescapable affirmation may, then, strive to be open to the future in the sense of being attuned to the singular situation and its aporetic demands: “Every action and every political decision ought to invent its norm or its rule.”50 This invention may aim at the reduction of violence, but it cannot be asked to always aim at unconditional hospitality and openness to the other and to the future in the normative sense. Geoffrey Bennington, who has advanced this second interpretation of Derrida’s ethics – although he also appears to maintain what I have analyzed as the argument from noncontradiction – has recognized this paradox, but still thinks it possible to hold on to “something like the categorical imperative in terms of a ‘lesser violence in an economy of violence.’”51 Due to this paradox, Derrida is more consistent when he claims that the aporias and “internal contradictions” besetting unconditional hospitality render its regulative idea inaccessible not only for empirical, but for structural reasons.52 Thus, we should draw a conclusion Derrida does not appear to draw: openness to the other and to the future cannot be stipulated as a normative, regulative idea with universal reach. If invention is to be truly inventive and attuned to singularity, it cannot be limited in advance by a regulative idea, even if the regulative idea is precisely the idea of unconditional openness. For the idea of giving a criterion for the absence or relative lack of criteria is not only paradoxical, it limits the possibility of choice. Rather, political invention must be open to decide against openness: surely, there are singular situations where openness to the other is inadvisable, where a reduction of violence is to be expected not from unconditional hospitality but from (further) conditions, demands, and normative expectations placed on the other, and where political planning, as the projection of horizons, advances democratic hopes – even if such expectations and horizons must, for structural as well as normative reasons, themselves remain subject to repetition from the future to come.