Derrida - Force of Law

1
Force of Law: The "Mystical Foundation

of Authority"
Jacques Derrida
C'est ici un devoir, je dois m'adresser a vous en anglais.This is an

obligation, I must address myself to you in English.
The title of this colloquium and the problem that it requires me, as
you say transitively in your language, to address, have had me musing
for months. Although I've been entrusted with the formidable honor
of the "keynote address," I had nothing to do with the invention of
this title or with the implicit formulation of the problem. "Decon-
struction and the Possibility of Justice": the conjunction "and" brings
together words, concepts, perhaps things that don't belong to the
same category. A conjunction such as "and" dares to defy order, tax-
onomy, classificatory logic, no matter how it works: by analogy, dis-
tinction or opposition. An ill-tempered speaker might say: I don't see
the connection, no rhetoric could bend itself to such an exercise. I'd
be glad to try to speak of each of these things or these categories
("deconstruction," "possibility," "justice") and even of these syncate-
goremes ("and," "the," "of"), but not at all in this order, this taxis,
this taxonomy or this syntagm.
Translated by Mary Quaintance. The author would like to thank Sam Weber for his
help in the final revision of this text. Except for some footnotes added after the fact, this
text corresponds to the version distributed at the colloquium on "Deconstruction and
the Possibility of Justice" (October 1989, Cardozo Law School), of which Jacques Der-
rida read only the first part to open the session. For lack of time, Derrida was unable to
conclude the elaboration of the work in progress, of which this is only a preliminary
version. In addition, the second part of the lecture, the part that precisely was not read
but only discussed at the same colloquium, was delivered on April 26, 1990, to open a
colloquium organized by Saul Friedlander at the University of California, Los Angeles
on Nazism and the "Final Solution"; Probing the Limits of Representation.
4/ The "Mystical Foundation of Authority" Jacques Derrida / 5
Such a speaker wouldn't merely be in a ba'd temper, he'd be in bad or heard and understood by the majority of those who are here and
faith. And even unjust. For one could easily propose an interpretation who manifestly lay down the law. "Faire la loi" (laying down the law)
that would do the title justice. Which is to say in this case an adequate is an interesting expression that we shall have more to say about later.
and lucid and so rather suspicious interpretation of the title'~ inten- 3. I must speak in a language that is not my own because that will
tions or vouloir-dire. This title suggests a question that itself takes the be more just, in another sense of the word juste, in the sense of justice,
form of a suspicion; does deconstruction insure, permit, authorize the a sense which, without worrying about it too much for now, we can
possibility of justice? Does it make justice possible, or a discourse of call juridico-ethico-political: it is more just to speak the language of
consequence on justice and the conditions of its possibility? Yes, cer- the majority, especially when, through hospitality, it grants a foreigner
tain people would reply; no, replies the other party. Do the so-called the right to speak. It's hard to say if the law we're referring to here is
deconstructionists have anything to say about justice, anything to do that of decorum, of politeness, the law of the strongest, or the equi-
with it? Why, basically, do they speak of it so little? Does it interest table law of democracy. And whether it depends on justice or law
them, in the end? Isn't it because, as certain people suspect, decon- (droit). Also, if I am to bend to this law and accept it, a certain number
struction doesn't in itself permit any just action, any just discourse on of conditions are necessary: for example, I must respond to an invi-
justice but instead constitutes a threat to droit, to law or right, a~d tation and manifest my desire to speak here, something that no one
ruins the condition of the very possibility of justice? Yes, certalll apparently has constrained me to do; I must be capable, up to a cer-
people would reply, no, replies the other party. In this first fictive e::c- tain point, of understanding the contract and the conditions of the
change one can already find equivocal slippages between law (drOIt) law, that is, of at least minimally adopting, appropriating, your lan-
and justice. The "sufferance" of deconstruction, what makes it suffer guage, which from that point ceases, at least to this extent, to be for-
and what makes those it torments suffer, is perhaps the absence of eign to me. You and I must understand, in more or less the same way,
rules, of norms, and definitive criteria that would allow one to distin- the translation of my text, initially written in French; this translation,
guish unequivocally between droit and justice. . . however excellent it may be (and I'll take this moment to thank Mary
That is the choice, the "either/or," "yes or no" that I detect III th1s Quaintance) necessarily remains a translation~ that is to sayan always
title. To this extent, the title is rather violent, polemical, inquisitorial. possible but always imperfect compromise between two idioms.
We may fear that it contains some instrument of torture-that is, a This question of language and idiom will doubtless be at the heart
manner of interrogation that is not the most just. Needless to say, of what I would like to propose for discussion tonight.
from this point on I can offer no response, at least no reassuring re- There are a certain number of idiomatic expressions in your lan-
sponse, to any questions put in this way ("either/or," "y~s or. no"), to guage that have always been rather valuable to me as they have no
either party or to either party's expectations formalized III th1s :-v ay. strict equivalent in French. I'll cite at least two of them, before I even
Ie dais, done, c'est ici un devoir, m'adresser a ~ous en .anglats. SO.I begin. They are not unrelated to what I'd like to try to say tonight.
must, this is an obligation, address myself to you III Enghsh. Ie Ie daiS A. The first is "to enforce the law," or "enforceability of the law or
contract." When one translates "to enforce the law" into French, by
... that means several things at once.
1. Ie dais speak English (how does one translate this '~dois," this "appliquer la loi," for example, one loses this direct or literal allusion
devoir? I must? I should, I ought to, I have to?) because 1t has been to the force that comes from within to remind us that law is always
imposed on me as a sort of obligation or condition by a sort of sym- an authorized force, a force that justifies itself or is justified in apply-
bolic force or law in a situation I do not control. A sort of polemos ing itself, even if this justification may be judged from elsewhere to be
already concerns the appropriation of language: if, at least, I want to unjust or unjustifiable. Applicability, "enforceability," is not an exte-
make myself understood, it is necessary that I speak your language, I rior or secondary possibility that mayor may not be added as a sup-
plement to law. It is the force essentially implied in the very concept
must.
2. I must speak your language because what I shall say will thus be of justice as law (droit), of justice as it becomes droit, of the law as
more juste, or deemed more juste, and be more justly appreciated, "droit" (for I want to insist right away on reserving the possibility of
juste this time [in the sense of "just right,"] in the sense of an adequ~ a justice, indeed of a law that not only exceeds or contradicts "law"
tion between what is and what is said or thought, between what 1S (droit) but also, perhaps, has no relation to law, or maintains such a
said and what is understood, indeed between what is thought and said strange relation to it that it may just as well command the "droit"
61 The "Mystical Foundation of Authority" Jacques Den"ida 1 7
that excludes it). The word "enforceability;' reminds us that there is Since this colloquium is devoted to deconstruction and the possibil-
no such thing as law (droit) that doesn't imply in itself, a priori, in the ity of justice, my first thought is that in the many texts considered
analytic structure of its concept, the possibility of being "enforced," "deconstructive", and particularly in certain of those that I've pub-
applied by force. There are, to be sure, laws that are not enforced, but lished myself, recourse to the word "force" is quite frequent, and in
there is no law without enforceability, and no applicability or enforce- strategic places I would even say decisive, but at the same time always
ability of the law without force, whether this force be direct or indi- or almost always accompanied by an explicit reserve, a guardedness.
rect, physical or symbolic, exterior or interior, brutal or subtly discur- I have often called for vigilance, I have asked myself to keep in mind
sive and hermeneutic, coercive or regulative, and so forth. the risks spread by this word, whether it be the risk of an obscure,
How are we to distinguish between this force of the law, this "force substantialist, occulto-mystic concept or the risk of giving authoriza-
of law," as one says in English as well as in French, I believe, and the tion to violent, unjust, arbitrary force. I won't cite these texts. That
violence that one always deems unjust? What difference is there be- would be self-indulgent and would take too much time, but I ask you
tween, on the one hand, the force that can be just, or in any case to trust me. A first precaution against the risks of substantialism or
deemed legitimate (not only an instrument in the service of law but irrationalism that I just evoked involves the differential character of
the practice and even the realization, the essence of droit), and on the force. For me, it is always a question of differential force, of difference
other hand the violence that one always deems unjust? What is a just as difference of force, of force as differance (differance is a force diffe-
force or a non-violent force? To stay with the question of idiom, let ree-differante), of the relation between force and form, between force
me turn here to a German word that will soon be occupying much of and signification, performative force, illocutionary or perlocutionary
our attention: Gewalt. In English, as in French, it is often translated force, of persuasive and rhetorical force, of affirmation by signature,
as "violence." The Benjamin text that I will be speaking to you about but also and especially of all the paradoxical situations in which the
soon is entitled "Zur Kritik der Gewalt," translated in French as "Cri- greatest force and the greatest weakness strangely enough exchange
tique de la violence" and in English as "Critique of Violence." But places. And that is the whole history. What remains is that I've always
these two translations, while not altogether injustes (and so not alto- been uncomfortable with the word force, which I've often judged to
gether violent), are very active interpretations that don't do justice to be indispensable, and I thank you for thus forcing me to try and say a
the fact that Gewalt also signifies, for Germans, legitimate power, au- little more about it today. And the same thing goes for justice. There
thority, public force. Gesetzgebende Gewalt is legislative power, geist- are no doubt many reasons why the majority of texts hastily identified
liche Gewalt the spiritual power of the church, Staatsgewalt the au- as "deconstructionist"-for example, mine-seem, I do say seem, not
thority or power of the state. Gewalt, then, is both violence and to foreground the theme of justice (as theme, precisely), or the theme
legitimate power, justified authority. How are we to distinguish be- of ethics or politics. Naturally this is only apparently so, if one consid-
tween the force of law of a legitimate power and the supposedly ori- ers, for example, (I will only mention these) the many texts devoted
ginary violence that must have established this authority and that to Levinas and to the relations between "violence and metaphysics,"
could not itself have been authorized by any anterior legitimacy, so or to the philosophy of right, Hegel's, with all its posterity in Glas, of
that, in this initial moment, it is neither legal nor illegal-or, others which it is the principal motif, or the texts devoted to the drive for
would quickly say, neither just nor unjust? I gave a lecture in Chicago power and to the paradoxes of power in Speculer-sur Freud, to the
a few days ago-which I'm deliberately leaving aside here, even law, in Devant la loi (on Kafka's Vor dem Gesetz) or in Declaration
though its theme is closely connected-devoted to a certain number d'Independance, in Admiration de Nelson Mandela ou les lois de la
of texts by Heidegger in which the words Walten and Gewalt playa re-flexion, and in many other texts. It goes without saying that dis-
decisive role, as one cannot simply translate them by either force or courses on double affirmation, the gift beyond exchange and distri-
violence, especially not in a context where Heidegger will attempt to bution, the undecidable, the incommensurable or the incalculable, or
demonstrate his claim that originally, and for example for Heraclitus, on singularity, difference and heterogeneity are also, through and
Dike-justice, droit, trial, penalty or punishment, vengeance, and so through, at least obliquely discourses on justice.
forth-is Eris (conflict, Streit, discord, polemos or Kampf), that is, it Besides, it was normal, foreseeable, desirable that studies of decon-
is adikia, injustice, as well. We could come back to this, if you wish, structive style should culminate in the problematic of law (droit), of
during the discussion, but I prefer to hold off on it for now. law and justice. (I have elsewhere tried to show that thf' f'~~pnrp "F 1..,,,,
is not prohibitive but affirmative.) Such would even be the most proper ~lways, of course, very mediated way, not only in the profession but
place for them, if such a thing existed. A deconstructive interrogation III what one calls the cite, the polis and more generally the world. Not,
that starts, as was the case here, by destabilizing or complicating the doubtless, to change things in the rather naive sense of calculated
opposition between nomos and physis, between thesis and physis- deliberate
. and strategically controlled intervention, but in the sense of
that is to say, the opposition between law, convention, the institution maxI~um intensification of a transformation in progress, in the name
on the one hand, and nature on the other, with all the oppositions that of n~lther a simple symptom nor a simple cause (other categories are
they condition; for example, and this is only an example, that between requ.lre.d here). In an industrial and hyper-technologized society, aca-
positive law and natural law (the differance is the displacement of this demIa IS .less than ever the monadic or monastic ivory tower that in
oppositional logic), a deconstructive interrogation that starts, as this any case It never was. And this is particularly true of "law schools."
one did, by destabilizing, complicating, or bringing out the paradoxes I hasten to add here, briefly, the following three points:
of values like those of the proper and of property in all their registers, 1. This conjunction or conjuncture is no doubt inevitable between
of the subject, and so of the responsible subject, of the subject of law ?n the one ?and, a de~onstruction of a style more directly philosoph~
(droit) and the subject of morality, of the juridical or moral person, of I~al or motIvated by lIterary theory and, on the other hand, juridico-
intentionality, etc., and of all that follows from these, such a decon- lIterary reflection and "critical legal studies."
structive line of questioning is through and through a problematiza- . 2. It is certainly not by chance that this corijunction has developed
tion of law and justice. A problematization of the foundations of law, III such an interesting way in this country; this is another problem-
morality and politics. This questioning of foundations is neitherfoun- urgent and compelling-that I must leave aside for lack of time. There
dationalist nor anti-foundationalist. Nor does it pass up opportunities are no doubt profound and complicated reasons of global dimensions,
to put into question or even to exceed the possibility or the ultimate I mean geo-political and not merely domestic, for the fact that this
necessity of questioning, of the questioning form of thought, interro- development should be first and foremost North American.
gating without assurance or prejudice the very history of the question 3. Above all, if it has seemed urgent to give our attention to this
and of its philosophical authority. For there is an authority-and so a j~int or concurrent development and to participate in it, it is just as
legitimate force in the questioning form of which one might ask one- VItal that we do not confound largely heterogeneous and unequal dis-
self whence it derives such great force in our tradition. courses, styles and discursive contexts. The word "deconstruction"
If, hypothetically, it had a proper place, which is precisely what could, in certain cases, induce or encourage such a confusion. The
cannot be the case, such a deconstructive "questioning" or meta- word itself gives rise to so many misunderstandings that one wouldn't
questioning would be more at home in law schools, perhaps also- want to add to them by reducing all the styles of critical legal studies
this sometimes happens-in theology or architecture departments, to one or by making them examples or extensions of Deconstruction
than in philosophy departments and much more than in the literature with a capital "D." However unfamiliar they may be to me, I know
departments where it has often been thought to belong. That is why, that these efforts in critical legal studies have their history, their con-
without knowing them well from the inside, for which I feel I am to text, and their proper idiom; in relation to such a philosophico-
blame, without pretending to any familiarity with them, I think that deconstructive questioning they are often (we shall say for the sake of
the developments in "critical legal studies" or in work by people like brevity) uneven, timid, approximating or schematic, not to mention
Stanley Fish, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Drucilla Cornell, Sam Weber belated, although their specialization and the acuity of their technical
and others, which situates itself in relation to the articulation between competence puts them, on the other hand, very much in advance of
literature and philosophy, law and politico-institutional problems, are what.ever state deconstruction finds itself in a more literary or philo-
today, from the point of view of a certain deconstruction, among the sophIcal field. Respect for contextual, academico-institutional, discur-
most fertile and the most necessary. They respond, it seems to me, to sive specificities, mistrust for analogies and hasty transpositions, for
the most radical programs of a deconstruction that would like, in or- confused homogenizations, seem to me to be the first imperatives the
der to be consistent with itself, not to remain enclosed in purely spec- way things stand today. I hope in any case that this encounter will
ulative, theoretical, academic discourses but rather (with all due re- leave us with the memory of disparities and disputes at least as much
spect to Stanley Fish) to aspire to something more consequential, to as it leaves us with agreements, with coincidences or consensus.
change things and to intervene in an efficient and responsible, though I said a moment ago: it only appears that deconstruction, in its
manifestations most recognized as such, hasn't "addressed," as one justice, it is not achieved if it doesn't have the force to be "enforced."
says in English, the problem of justice. It only appears that way, but a ~ow~rless justice is not justice, in the sense of droit-" la force sa~s
one must account for appearances, "keep up appearances" as Aris- la Justzc.e est tyranni~ue. La justice sans force est contredite, parce qu'il
totle said, and that is how I'd like to employ myself here: to show why y a touJours des mechants; la force sans la justice est accusee. II faut
and how what is now called Deconstruction, while seeming not to do~c m.ettre e~semble la justice et la force; et pour cela faire que ce
"address" the problem of justice, has done nothing but address it, if quz est Juste sozt fort, au que ce qui est fort soit juste" ("force without
only obliquely, unable to do so directly. Obliquely, as at this very mo- justice is tyra?nical. Justice without force is contradictory, as there are
ment, in which I'm preparing to demonstrate that one cannot speak ~I:-vays the WICked; force without justice is accused of wrong. And so
directly about justice, thematize or objectivize justice, say "this is just" It IS necessary to put justice and force together; and, for this, to make
and even less "I am just," without immediately betraying justice, if not sure that what is just be strong, or what is strong be just.") It is diffi-
law (droit).1 cul~ t.o decide whether the "it is necessary" in this conclusion ("And
But I have not yet begun. I started by saying that I must address so It IS necessary to put justice and force together") is an "it is neces-
myself to you in your language and announced right away that I've sary" prescribe~ by w?at is just in justice or by what is necessary in
always found at least two of your idiomatic expressions invaluable, f?rce. But that IS a pomtless hesitation since justice demands, as jus-
indeed irreplaceable. One was "to enforce the law," which always re- tIce, recourse to force. The necessity of force is implied, then in the
minds us that if justice is not necessarily law (droit) or the law, it "juste" in "justice." ,
cannot become justice legitimately or de jure except by withholding This pensee, what continues and concludes it ("And so, since it was
force or rather by appealing to force from its first moment, from its not possible to make the just strong, the strong have been made just")
first word. "At the beginning of justice there was logos, speech or deserv~s a longer analysis than I can offer here. The principle of my
language," which is not necessarily in contradiction with another in- an~lysls (or ra~her of my active and anything but non-violent interpre-
cipit, namely, "In the beginning there will have been force." tatlO~), of the mterpret.ation at the heart of what I will indirectly pro-
Pascal says it in a fragment I may return to later, one of his famous pose m the course of thIS lecture, will, notably in the case of this Pascal
"pensees," as usual more difficult than it seems. It starts like this: "Jus- pensee, run counter to tradition and to its most obvious context. This
tice, force.-I1 est juste que ce qui est juste soit suivi, il est necessaire context and the conventional interpretation that it seems to dictate
que ce qui est Ie plus fort soit suivi." Uustice, force.-It is just that r~n~, ?recisel~, .in. a conventionalist direction toward the sort of pes-
what is just be followed, it is necessary that what is strongest be fol- SImIstIC, relatIVIstIc and empiricist skepticism that drove Arnaud to
lowed" frag. 298, Brunschvicq edition) The beginning of this frag- suppress these pensees in the Port Royal edition, alleging that Pascal
ment is already extraordinary, at least in the rigor of its rhetoric. It wrote them under the impression of a reading of Montaigne, who
says that what is just must be followed (followed by consequence, thought that laws were not in themselves just but rather were just only
followed by effect, applied, enforced) and that what is strongest must becaus~ they w.ere laws. It is true that Montaigne used an interesting
also be followed (by consequence, effect, and so on). In other words, expressIOn, whIch Pascal takes up for his own purposes and which I'd
the common axiom is that the just and the strongest, the most just as also like to reinterpret and to consider apart from its most conven-
or as well as the strongest, must be followed. But this "must be fol- tional and conventionalist reading. The expression is "fondement
lowed," common to the just and the strongest, is "right" ("juste") in "!ystique de l'autorite," "mystical foundation of authority." Pascal
one case, "necessary" in the other: "It is just that what is just be fol- cItes Montaigne without naming him when he writes in pensee 293:
lowed" -in other words, the concept or idea of the just, in the sense " ... l'un dit que l' essence de la justice est l' autorite du legislateur
of justice, implies analytically and a priori that the just be "suivi," l'autre la commodite du souverain, l'autre la coutume presente; et c'es~
followed up, enforced, and it is just-also in the sense of "just Ie plus sur: rien, suivant la seule raison, n'est juste de soi; tout bran Ie
right" -to think this way. "It is necessary that what is strongest be avec Ie temps. La coutume fait toute l'equite, par cette seule raison
enforced." qU'elle est rer;ue; c'est Ie fondement mystique de son autorite. Qui la
And Pascal continues: "La justice sans la force est impuissante" ramene ason principe, l'aneantit." (" ... one man says that the essence
("Justice without force is impotent")-in other words, justice isn't of justice is the authority of the legislator, another that it is the con-
venience of the king, another that it is current custom; and the latter utilitarian relativism, beyond a nihilism, old or new, that would make
is closest to the truth: simple reason tells us that nothing is just in the law a "masked power," beyond the cynical moral of La Fontaine's
itself; everything crumbles with time. Custom is the sole basis for "The Wolf and the Sheep," according to which "La raison du plus fort
equity, for the simple reason that it is received; it is the mystical foun- est toujours la meilleure" ("Might makes right").
dation of its authority. Whoever traces it to its source annihilates it.") The Pascalian critique, in its principle, refers us back to original sin
Montaigne was in fact talking about a "mystical foundation" of the and to the corruption of natural laws by a reason that is itself corrupt.
authority of laws: "Or les loix," he says, "se maintiennent en credit, ("II y a sans doute des lois naturelles; mais cette .belle raison a tout
non parce qu'elles sont justes, mais parce qu'elles sont loix: c'est Ie corrompu," section IV, 294; "There are, no doubt, natural laws; but
fondement mystique de leur auctorite, elles n'en ont point d'autre . ... this fine thing called reason has corrupted everything," and elsewhere:
Quiconque leur obeit parce qu' elles sont justes, ne leur obeit pas jus- "Notre justice s'aneantit devant la justice divine," 263; "Our justice
tement par OU il doibt" ("And so laws keep up their good standing, comes to nothing before divine justice." I cite these pensees to prepare
not because they are just, but because they are laws: that is the mys- for our reading of Benjamin.)
tical foundation of their authority, they have no other.... Anyone But if we set aside the functional mechanism of the Pascalian cri-
who obeys them because they are just is not obeying them the way he tique, if we dissociate it from Christian pessimism, which is not im-
ought to.")2 possible, then we can find in it, as in Montaigne, !he basis for a mod-
Here Montaigne is clearly distinguishing laws, that is to say droit, esrLcritical philosophy, indeed for a critique of juridical ideology, a
from justice. The justice of law, justice as law is not justice. Laws are desedimentation of the superstructures of law that both hide and re-
not just as laws. One obeys them not because they are just but because flect the economic and political interests of the dominant forces of
they haveauth~rj!y. society. This would be both possible and always useful.
Little by little I shall explain what I understand by this expression But beyond its principle and its mechanism, this Pascali an pensee
"mystical foundation of authority." It is true that Montaigne also perhaps concerns a more intrinsic structure, ope that a critique of ju-
wrote the following, which must, again, be interpreted by going be- ridical ideology should never overlook. The very emergence of justice
yond its simply conventional and conventionalist surface: "(notre and law, the founding and justifying moment that institutes law im-
droit meme a, dit-on des fictions ligitimes sur lesquelles il fonde la plies a performative force, which is always an interpretative force: this
verite de sa justice)"; "(even our law, it is said, has legitimate fictions time not in the sense of law in the service of force, its docile instru-
on which it founds the truth of its justice)." I used these words as an ment, servile and thus exterior to the dominant power, but rather in
epigraph to a text on VOl' dem Gesetz. What is a legitimate fiction? the sense of law that would maintain a more internal, more complex
What does it mean to establish the truth of justice? These are among relation with what one calls force, power or violence. Justice-in the
the questions that await us. It is true that Montaigne proposed an sense of droit (right or law)-would not simply be put in the service
analogy between this supplement of a legitimate fiction, that is, the of a social force or power, for example an economic, political, ideo-
fiction necessary to establish the truth of justice, and the supplement logical power that would exist outside or before it and which it would
of artifice called for by a deficiency in nature, as if the absence of have to accommodate or bend to when useful. Its very moment of
natural law called for the supplement of historical or positive, that is foundation or institution (which in any case is never a mOl;nent in-
to say, fictional, law (droit), just as-to use Montaigne's analogy- scribed in the homogeneous tissue of a history, since it is ripped apart
"les femmes qui emploient des dents d'ivoire OU les leurs naturelles with one decision), the operation that amounts to founding, inaugu-
leur manquent, et, au lieu de leur vrai teint, en forgent un de quelque rating, justifying law (droit), making law, would consist of a coup de
matiere etrangere ... " (Livre II, ch. XII, p. 601 Pleiade); ("women force, of a performative and therefore interpretative violence that in
who use ivory teeth when they're missing their real ones, and who, itself is neither just nor unjust and that no justice and no previous law
instead of showing their true complexion, forge one with some foreign with its founding anterior moment could guarantee or contradict or
material ..."). invalidate. No justificatory discourse could or should insure the role
Perhaps the Pascal pensee that, as he says, "puts together" justice of metalanguage in relation to the performativity of institutive lan-
and force and makes force an essential predicate of justice (by which guage or to its dominant interpretation.
he means "droit" more than justice) goes beyond a conventionalist or Here the discourse comes up against its limit: in itself, in its per-
141 The "Mystical Foundation of Authority" Jacques Derrida I 15
\ formative power itself. It is what I here propose to call the mystical. if such a thing exists. Deconstruction is justice. It is perhaps because
Here a silence is walled up in the violent structure of the founding act. law (droit) (which I will consistently try to distinguish from justice) is
Walled up, walled in because silence is not exterior to language. It is constructible, in a sense that goes beyond the opposition between con-
in this sense that I would be tempted to interpret, beyond simple com- vention and nature, it is perhaps insofar as it goes beyond this oppo-
mentary, what Montaigne and Pascal call the mystical foundation of sition that it is constructible and so deconstructible and, what's more,
authority. One can always turn what I am doing or saying here back that it makes deconstruction possible, or at least the practice of a de- ~
onto -or against-the very thing that I am saying is happening thus construction that, fundal1lentally, always proceeds to questions of
at the origin of every institution. I would therefore take the use of the droit and to the subject of droit. (1) The deconstructibility of law·
word "mystical" in what I'd venture to call a rather Wittgensteinian (droit), of legality, legitimacy or legitimation (for example) makes'de-
direction. These texts by Montaigne and Pascal, along with the texts construction possible. (2) The undeconstructibility of justice also
from the tradition to which they belong and the rather active interpre- makes deconstruction possible, indeed is inseparable from it. (3) The
tation of them that I propose, could be brought into Stanley Fish's result: deconstruction takes place in the interval that separates the
discussion in "Force" (Doing What Comes Naturally) of Hart's Con- undeconstructibility of justice from the deconstructibility of droit (au-
cept of Law, and several others, implicitly including Rawls, himself thority, legitimacy, and so on). It is possible as an experience of the
criticized by Hart, as well as into many debates illuminated by certain impossible, there where, even if it does not exist (or does not yet ex-
texts of Sam Weber on the agnostic and not simply intra-institutional ist, or never does exist), there is justice. Wherever one can replace,
or mono-institutional character of certain conflicts in Institution and translate, determine the x of justice, one should say: deconstruction
Interpretation. 3 is possible, as impossible, to the extent (there) where there is (unde-
Since the origin of authority, the foundation or ground, the position constructible) x, thus to the extent (there) where there is (the undecon-
of the law can't by definition r~st on anything but themselves, they are structible) .
themselves a violence without ground. Which is not to say that they In other words, the hypothesis and propositions toward which I'm
are in themselves unjust, in the sense of "illegal." They are neither tentatively moving here call more for the subtitle: justice as the pos-
legal nor illegal in their founding moment. They exceed the opposition sibility of deconstruction, the structure of law (droit) or of the law, the
between founded and unfounded, or between any foundationalism or foundation or the self-authorization of law (droit) as the possibility of
anti-foundationalism. Even if the success of performatives that found the exercise of deconstruction. I'm sure this isn't altogether clear; I
law or right (for example, and this is more than an example, of a state hope, though I'm not sure of it, that it will become a little clearer in a
as guarantor of a right) presupposes earlier conditions and conven- moment.
tions (for example in the national or international arena), the same I've said, then, that I have not yet begun. Perhaps I'll never begin
"mystical" limit will reappear at the supposed origin of said condi- and perhaps this colloquium will have to do without a "keynote,"
tions, rules or conventions, and at the origin of their dominant inter- except that I've already begun. I authorize myself-but by what
pretation. right?-to multiply protocols and detours. I began by saying that I
The structure I am describing here is a structure in which law (droit) was in love with at least two of your idioms. One was the word "en-
is essentially deconstructible, whether because it is founded, con- forceability," the other was the transitive use of the verb "to address."
structed on interpretable and transformable textual strata (and that is In French, one addresses oneself to someone, one addresses a letter or
the history of law [droit], its possible and necessary transformation, a word, also a transitive use, without being sure that they will arrive
sometimes its amelioration), or because its ultimate foundation is by at their destination, but one does not address a problem. Still less does
definition unfounded. The fact that law is deconstructible is not bad one address someone. Tonight I have agreed by contract to address, in
news. We may even see in this a stroke of luck for politics, for all English, a problem, that is to go straight toward it and straight toward
historical progress. But the paradox that I'd like to submit for discus- you, thematically and without detour, in addressing myself to you in
sion is the following: it is this deconstructible structure of law (droit), your language. Between law or right, the rectitude of address, direc-
or if you prefer of justice as droit, that also insures the possibility of tion and uprightness, we should be able to find a direct line of com-
deconstruction. Justice in itself, if such a thing exists, outside or be- munication and to find ourselves on the right track. Why does decon-
yond law, is not deconstructible. No more than deconstruction itself, struction have the reputation, justified or not, of treating things
obliquely, indirectly, with "quotation marks," and of always asking the primary addressees of this discourse, but at the same time toward
whether things arrive at the indicated address? Is this reputation de- the place of essential decision for said problems. Address-as direc-
served? And, deserved or not, how does one explain it? tion, as rectitude-says something about droit (law or right); and
And so we have already, in the fact that I speak another's language what we must not forget when we want justice, when we want to be
and break with my own, in the fact that I give myself up to the other, just, is the rectitude of address. II ne faut pas manqu£!r d' adresse, I
a singular mixture of force, justesse and justice. might say in French, but above all it ne faut pas manquer l'adresse,
And I am obliged, it is an obligation, to "address" in English, as one mustn't miss the address, one mustn't mistake the address and the
you say in your language, infinite problems, infinite in their number, address always turns out to be singular. An address is always singular,
infinite in their history, infinite in their structure, covered by the title idiomatic, and justice, as law (droit), seems always to suppose the
Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. But we already know generality of a rule, a norm or a universal imperative. How are we to
that these problems are not infinite simply because they are infinitely reconcile the act of justice that must always concern singularity, indi-
numerous, nor because they are rooted in the infinity of memories and viduals, irreplaceable groups and lives, the other or myself as other, in
cultures (religious, philosophical, juridical, and so forth) that we shall a unique situation, with rule, norm, value or the imperative of justice
never master. They are infinite, if we may say so, in themselves, be- which necessarily have a general form, even if this generality pre-
cause they require the very experience of the aporia that is not unre- scribes a singular application in each case? If I were content to apply
lated to what I just called the "mystical." When I say that they require a just rule, without a spirit of justice and without in some way invent-
the very experience of aporia, I mean two things. (1) As its name in- ing the rule and the example for each case, I might be protected by
dicates, an experience is a traversal, something that traverses and trav- law (droit), my action corresponding to objective law, but I would not
els toward a destination for which it finds the appropriate passage. be just. I would act, Kant would say, in conformity with duty, but not
The experience finds its way, its passage, it is possible. And in this through duty or out of respect for the law. Is it ever possible to say:
sense it is impossible to have a full experience of aporia, that is, of an action is not only legal, but also just? A person is not only within
/ something that does not allow passage. An aporia is a non-road. From his rights but also within justice? Such a man or woman is just, a
this point of view, justice would be the experience that we are not able decision is just? Is it ever possible to say: I know that I am just? Allow
to experience. We shall soon encounter more than one aporia that we me another detour.
shall not be able to pass. But (2) I think that there is no justice without To address oneself to the other in the language of the other is, it
this experience, however impossible it may be, of aporia. Justice is an seems, the condition of all possible justice, but apparently, in all rigor,
experience of the impossible.(A will, a desire, a demand for justice it is not only impossible (since I cannot speak the language of the other
whose structure wouldn't be an experience of aporia would have no except to the extent that I appropriate it and assimilate it according
chance to be what it is, namely, a call for justice:. Every time that to the law of an implicit third) but even excluded by justice as law
something comes to pass or turns out well, every time that we placidly (droit), inasmuch as justice as right seems to imply an element of uni-
apply a good rule to a particular case, to a correctly subsumed ex- versality, the appeal to a third party who suspends the linilaterality or
ample, according to a determinant judgment, we can be sure that law singularity of the idioms.
(droit) may find itself accounted for, but certainly not justice. Law When I address myself to someone in English, it is always an ordeal
(droit) is not justice. Law is the element of calculation, and it is just for me. For my addressee, for you as well, I imagine. Rather than
that there be law, but justice is incalculable, it requires us to calculate explain why and lose time in doing so, I begin in medias res, with
with the incalculable; and aporetic experiences are the experiences, as several remarks that for me tie the agonizing gravity of this problem
improbable as they are necessary, of justice, that is to say of moments of language to the question of justice, of the possibility of justice.
in which the decision between just and unjust is never insured by a First remark: On the one hand, for fundamental reasons, it seems
.! rule. just to us to "rendre la justice," as one says in French, in a given idiom,
And so I must address myself to you and "address" problems, I in a language in which all the "subjects" concerned are supposedly
must do it briefly and in a foreign language. To do it briefly, I ought competent, that is, capable of understanding and interpreting-all the
to do it as directly as possible, going straight ahead, without detour, "subjects," that is, those who establish the laws, those who judge and
without historical alibi, without obliqueness, toward you, supposedly those who are judged, witnesses in both the broad and narrow sense,
all those who are guarantors of the exercise of justice, or rather of fice is essential to the structure of subjectivity, which is also to say to
droit. It is unjust to judge someone who does not understand the lan- the founding of the intentional subject and to the founding, if not of
guage in which the law is inscribed or the judgment pronounced, etc. the law, at least of law (droit), the difference between the law and law
We could give multiple dramatic examples of violent situations in (droit), justice and law (droit), justice and the law here remaining open
which a person or group of persons is judged in an idiom they do not over an abyss. I will leave these problems aside for the moment, along
understand very well or at all. And however slight or subtle the differ- with the affinity between carnivorous sacrifice, at the basis of our cul-
ence of competence in the mastery of the idiom is here, the violence of ture and our law, and all the cannibalisms, symbolic or not, that struc-
an injustice has begun when all the members of a community do not ture intersubjectivity in nursing, love, mourning and, in truth, in all
share the same idiom throughout. Since in all rigor this ideal situation symbolic or linguistic appropriations.
is never possible, we can perhaps already draw some inferences about If we wish to speak of injustice, of violence or of a lack of respect
what the title of our conference calls "the possibility of justice." The toward what we still so confusedly call animals-the question is more
violence of this injustice that consists of judging those who don't topical than ever, and so I include in it, in the name of deconstruction,
understand the idiom in which one claims, as one says in French, that a set of questions on carno-phallogocentrism-we must reconsider in
"justice est faite," ("justice is done," "made") is not just any violence, its totality the metaphysico-anthropocentric axiomatic that domi-
any injustice. This injustice supposes that the other, the victim of the nates, in the West, the thought of just and unjust.
language's injustice, is capable of a language in general, is man as a From this very first step we can already glimpse the first of its con-
speaking animal, in the sense that we, men, give to this word la~ sequences, namely, that a deconstructionist approach to the bounda-
guage. Moreover, there was a time, not long ago and not yet over, m ries that institute the human subject (preferably and paradigmatically
which "we, men" meant "we adult white male Europeans, carnivo- the adult male, rather than the woman, child or animal) as the mea-
rous and capable of sacrifice." sure of the just and the unjust, does not necessarily lead to injustice,
In the space in which I'm situating these remarks or reconstituting nor to the effacement of an opposition between just and unjust but
this discourse one would not speak of injustice or violence toward an may, in the name of a demand more insatiable than justice, lead to a
animal, even less toward a vegetable or a stone. An animal can be reinterpretation of the whole apparatus of boundaries within which a
made to suffer, but we would never say, in a sense considered proper, history and a culture have been able to confine their criteriology.
that it is a wronged subject, the victim of a crime, of a murder, of a Under the hypothesis that I shall only touch lightly upon for the mo-
rape or a theft, of a perjury-and this is true a fortiori, we think, for ment, what is currently called deconstruction would not correspond
what we call vegetable or mineral or intermediate species like the (though certain people have an interest in spreading this confusion) to
sponge. There have been, there are still, many "subjects." am~ng ~an a quasi-nihilistic abdication before the ethico-politico-juridical ques-
kind who are not recognized as subjects and who receIve thIS ammal tion of justice and before the opposition between just and unjust, but
treatment (this is the whole unfinished history I briefly alluded to a rather to a double movement that I will schematize as follows:
moment ago). What we confusedly call "animal," the living thing as 1. The sense of a responsibility without limits, and so necessarily
living and nothing else, is not a subject of the law or of law (droit). excessive, incalculable, before memory; and so the task of recalling
The opposition between just and unjust has no meaning in. this c~se. the history, the origin and subsequent direction, thus the limits, of
As for trials for animals (there have been some) or laWSUIts agamst concepts of justice, the law and right, of values, norms, prescriptions
those who inflict certain kinds of suffering on animals (legislation in that have been imposed and sedimented there, from then on remaining
certain Western countries provides for this and speaks not only of the more or less readable or presupposed. As to the legacy we have re-
rights of man but also of the rights of animals in general), these are ceived under the name of justice, and in more than one language, the
considered to be either archaisms or still marginal and rare phenom- task of a historical and interpretative memory is at the heart of decon-
ena not constitutive of our culture. In our culture, carnivorous sacri- struction, not only as philologico-etymological task or the historian's
fice is fundamental, dominant, regulated by the highest industrial task but as responsibility in face of a heritage that is at the same time
technology, as is biological experimentation on animals-so vital to the heritage of an imperative or of a sheaf of injunctions. Deconstruc-
our modernity. As I have tried to show elsewhere,4 carnivorous sacri- tion is already engaged by this infinite demand of justice, for justice,
which can take the aspect of this "mystique" I spoke of earlier. One tion if not in this always unsatisfied appeal, beyond the given deter-
must be juste with justice, and the first way to do it justice is to hear, minations of what we call, in determined contexts, justice, the possi-
read, interpret it, to try to understand where it comes from, what it bility of justice? But it is still necessary to interpret this disproportion.
wants of us, knowing that it does so through singular idioms (Dike, If I were to say that I know nothing more just than what I today call
Jus, justitia, justice, Gerechtigkeit, to limit ourselves to European idi- deconstruction (nothing more just, I'm not saying nothing more legal
oms which it may also be necessary to delimit in relation to others: or more legitimate), I know that I wouldn't fail to surprise or shock
we shall come back to this later) and also knowing that this justice not only the determined advers~ries of said deconstruction or of what
always addresses itself to singularity, to the singularity of the other, they imagine under this name but also the very people who pass for
despite or even because it pretends to universality. Consequently, never or take themselves to be its partisans or its practitioners. And so I will
to yield on this point, constantly to maintain an interrogation of the not say it, at least not directly and not without the precaution of sev-
origin, grounds and limits of our conceptual, theoretical or normative eral detours.
apparatus surrounding justice is on deconstruction's part anything but As you know, in many countries, in the past and in the present, one
a neutralization of interest in justice, an insensitivity toward injustice. founding violence of the law or of the imposition of state law has
On the contrary, it hyperbolically raises the stakes of exacting justice; consisted in imposing a language on national or ethnic minorities
it is sensitivity to a sort of essential disproportion that must inscribe regrouped by the state. This was the case in France on at least
excess and inadequation in itself and that strives to denounce not only two occasions, first when the Villers-Cotteret decree consolidated the
theoretical limits but also concrete injustices, with the most palpable unity of the monarchic state by imposing French as the juridico-
effects, in the good conscience that dogmatically stops before any in- administrative language and by forbidding that Latin, the language of
herited determination of justice. law and of the Church, allow all the inhabitants of the kingdom to be
2. This responsibility toward memory is a responsibility before the represented in a common language, by a lawyer-interpreter, without
very concept of responsibility that regulates the justice and appro- the imposition of the particular language that French still was. It is
priateness (justesse) of our behavior, of our theoretical, practical, true that Latin was already a violent imposition and that from this
ethico-political decisions. This concept of responsibility is inseparable point of view the passage from Latin to French was only the passage
from a whole network of connected concepts (property, intentionality, from one violence to another. The second major moment of imposi-
will, freedom, conscience, consciousness, self-consciousness, subject, tion was that of the French Revolution, when linguistic unification
self, person, community, decision, and so forth) and any deconstruc- sometimes took the most repressive pedagogical turns, or in any case
tion of this network of concepts in their given or dominant state may the most authoritarian ones. I'm not going to engage in the history of
seem like a move toward irresponsibility at the very moment that, on these examples. We could also find them in this country, today, where
the contrary, deconstruction calls for an increase in responsibility. But this linguistic problem is still acute and will be for a long time, pre-
in the moment that an axiom's credibility (credit) is suspended by de- cisely in this place where questions of politics, education and law
construction, in this structurally necessary moment, one can always (droit) are inseparable (and where a debate has been recently begun
believe that there is no more room for justice, neither for justice itself on "national standards" of education).
nor for theoretical interest directed toward the problems of justice. Now I am moving right along, without the least detour through
This moment of suspense, this period of epoche, without which, in historical memory toward the formal, abstract statement of several
fact, deconstruction is not possible, is always full of anxiety, but who aporias, those in which, between law and justice, deconstruction finds
will claim to be just by economizing on anxiety? And this anxiety- its privileged site-or rather its privileged instability. Deconstruction
ridden moment of suspense-which is also the interval of spacing in is generally practiced in two ways or two styles, although it most often
which transformations, indeed juridico-political revolutions take grafts one on to the other. One takes on the demonstrative and appar-
place-cannot be motivated, cannot find its movement and its impulse ently ahistorical allure of logico-formal paradoxes. The other, more
(an impulse which itself cannot be suspended) except in the demand historical or more anamnesic, seems to proceed through readings of
for an increase in or supplement to justice, and so in the experience of texts, meticulous interpretations and genealogies. I will devote my at-
an inadequation or an incalculable disproportion. For in the end, tention to these two practices in turn.
where will deconstruction find its force, its movement or its motiva- First I will drily, directly state, I will "address" the following apo-
22 / The "Mystical Foundation of Authority" Jacques Derrida / 23
rias. In fact there is only one aporia, only one potential aporetic that is just or unjust. But this freedom or this decision of the just, if it is
infinitely distributes itself. I shall only propose a few examples that one, must follow a law or a prescription, a rule. In this sense, in its
will suppose, make explicit or perhaps produce a difficult and unstable very autonomy, in its freedom to follow or to give itself laws, it must
distinction between justice and droit, between justice (infinite, incal- have the power to be of the calculable or programmable order, for
. cuI able, rebellious to rule and foreign to symmetry, heterogeneous and example as an act of fairness. But if the act simply consists of applying
: heterotropic) and the exercise of justice as law or right, legitimacy or a rule, of enacting a program or effecting a calculation, we might say
legality, stabilizable and statutory, calculable, a system of regulated that it is legal, that it conforms to law, and perhaps, by metaphor, that
and coded prescriptions. I would be tempted, up to a certain point, to it is just, but we would be wrong to say that the decision was just.
compare the concept of justice-which I'm here trying to distinguish To be just, the decision of a judge, for example, must not only fol-
from law-to Levinas's, just because of this infinity and because of Iowa rule of law or a general law but must also assume it, approve it,
the heteronomic relation to others, to the faces of otherness that gov- confirm its value, by a reinstituting act of interpretation, as if ultima-
ern me, whose infinity I cannot thematize and whose hostage I remain. tely nothing previously existed of the law, as if the judge himself in-
In Totalite and Infini ("Verite et Justice," p. 62), Levinas writes: " ... vented the law in every case. No exercise of justice as law can be just
la relation avec autrui-c' est a dire la justice" (" ... the relation to unless there is a "fresh judgment" (I borrow this English expression
others-that is to say, justice")-which he defines, moreover, as from Stanley Fish's article, "Force," in Doing What Comes Naturally).
"droiture de l'accueil fait au visage" (p. 54) ("equitable honoring of This "fresh judgment" can very well-1mtst very well-conform to a
faces"). Equity (la droiture) is not reducible to right or law (le droit), preexisting law, but the reinstituting, reinventive and freely decisive
of course, but the two values are not unrelated. interpretation, the responsible interpretation of the judge requires that
Levinas speaks of an infinite right: in what he calls "Jewish human- his "justice" not just consist in conformity, in the conservative and
ism," whose basis is not "the concept of man," but rather the other; reproductive activity of judgment. In short, for a decision to be just
"the extent of the right of the other" is that of "a practically infinite and responsible, it must, in its proper moment if there is one, be both
right"; "l'etendue du droit d'autrui [est] un droit pratiquement infini" regulated and without regulation: it must conserve the law and also
("Un droit infini," in Du Sacre au Saint, Cinq Nouvelles Lectures Tal- destroy it or suspend it enough to have to reinvent it in each case,
mudiques, pp. 17-18). Here equity is not equality, calculated propor- rejustify it, at least reinvent it in the reaffirmation and the new and
tion, equitable distribution or distributive justice but rather absolute free confirmation of its principle. Each case is other, each decision is
dissymmetry. And Levinas's notion of justice might sooner be compa- different and requires an absolutely unique interpretation, which no
red to the Hebrew equivalent of what we would perhaps translate as existing, coded rule can or ought to guarantee absolutely. At least, if
"sanctity." But since Levinas's difficult discourse would give rise to the rule guarantees it in no uncertain terms, so that the judge is a
other difficult questions, I cannot be content to borrow conceptual calculating machine, which happens, and we will not say that he is
moves without risking confusions or analogies. And so I will go no just, free and responsible. But we also won't say it if he doesn't refer
further in this direction. Everything would still be simple if this dis- to any law, to any rule or if, because he doesn't take any rule for
tinction between justice and droit were a true distinction, an opposi- granted beyond his own interpretation, he suspends his decision, stops
tion whose functioning was logically regulated and permitted mastery. short before the undecidable or if he improvises and leaves aside all
But it turns out that droit claims to exercise itself in the name of justice rules, all principles. It follows from this paradox that there is never a
and that justice is required to establish itself in the name of a law that moment that we can say in the present that a decision is just (that is,
must be "enforced." Deconstruction always finds itself between these free and responsible), or that someone is a just man-even less, "I am
two poles. Here, then, are some examples of aporias. just." Instead of "just," we could say legal or legitimate, in conformity i
1. First aporia: epokhe of the rule. with a state of law, with the rules and conventions that authorize cal-
Our common axiom is that to be just or unjust and to exercise culation but whose founding origin only defers the problem of justice.
justice, I must be free and responsible for my actions, my behavior, For in the founding of law or in its institution, the same problem of
my thought, my decisions. We would not say of a being without free- justice will have been posed and violently resolved, that is to say bu-
dom, or at least of one without freedom in a given act, that its decision ried, dissimulated, repressed. Here the best paradigm is the founding
24 / The "Mystical Foundation of Authority" Jacques De1'1'ida / 25
of the nation-states or the institutive act 01 a constitution that esta- presence, any certitude or any supposed criteriology that would assure
blishes what one calls in French l'etat de droit. us of the justice of a decision, in truth of the very event of a decision.
2. Second aporia: the ghost of the undecidable. Who will ever be able to assure us that a decision as such has taken
Justice, as law, is never exercised without a decision that cuts, that place? That it has not, through such and such a detour, followed a
divides. This decision does not simply consist in its final form, for cause, a calculation, a rule, without even that imperceptible suspense
example a penal sanction, equitable or not, in the order of propor- that marks any free decision, at the moment that a rule is, or is not,
tional or distributive justice. It begins, it ought to begin, by right or in applied?
principle, with the initiative of learning, reading, understanding, in- The whole subjectal axiomatic of responsibility, of conscience, of
terpreting the rule, and even in calculating. For if calculation is cal- intentionality, of property that governs today's dominant juridical dis-
culation, the decision to calculate is not of the order of the calculable course and the category of decision right down to its appeals to med-
and must not be. ' ical expertise is so theoretically weak and crude that I need not em-
The undecidable, a theme often associated with deconstruction, is phasize it here. And the effects of these limitations are massive and
not merely the oscillation between two significations or two contra- concrete enough that I don't have to give examples.
dictory and very determinate rules, each equally imperative (for ex- We can already see from this second aporia or this second form of
ample respect for equity and universal right but also for the always the same aporia that the deconstruction of all presumption of a deter-
heterogeneous and unique singularity of the unsubsumable example). minant certitude of a present justice itself operates on the basis of an
The undecidable is not merely the oscillation or the tension between infinite "idea of justice," infinite because it is irreducible, irreducible
two decisions; it is the experience of that which, though heteroge- because owed to the other, owed to the other, before any contract,
neous, foreign to the order of the calculable and the rule, is still obli- because it has come, the other's coming as the singularity that is al-
ged-it is of obligation that we must speak-to give itself up to the ways other. This "idea of justice" seems to be irreducible in its affir-
impossible decision, while taking account of law and rules. A decision mative character, in its demand of gift without exchange, without cir-
that didn't go through the ordeal of the undecidable would not be a culation, without recognition or gratitude, without, economic
free decision, it would only be the programmable application or un- circularity, without calculation and without rules, without reason and
folding of a calculable process. It might be legal; it would not be just. without rationality. And so we can recognize in it, indeed accuse, iden-
But in the moment of suspense of the undecidable, it is not just eith~r, tify a madness. And perhaps another sort of mystique. And decon-
for only a decision is just (in order to maintain the proposition "only struction is mad about this kind of justice. Mad about this desire for
a decision is just," one need not refer decision to the structure of a justice. This kind of justice, which isn't law, is the very movement of
subject or to the propositional form of a judgment). And once the deconstruction at work in law and the history of law, in political his-
ordeal of the undecidable is past (if that is possible), the decision has tory and history itself, before it even presents itself as the discourse
again followed a rule or given itself a rule, invented it or reinvented, that the academy or modern culture labels "deconstructionism."
reaffirmed it, it is no longer presently just, fully just. There is appa- I would hesitate to assimilate too quickly this "idea of justice" to a
rently no moment in which a decision can be called presently and fully regulative idea (in the Kantian sense), to a messianic promise or to
just: either it has not yet been made according to a rule, and nothing other horizons of the same type. I am only speaking of a type, of this
allows us to call it just, or it has already followed a rule-whether type of horizon that would have numerous competing versions. By
received, confirmed, conserved or reinvented-which in its turn is not competing I mean similar enough in appearance and always pretend-
absolutely guaranteed by anything; and, moreover, if it were guaran- ing to absolute privilege and irreducible singularity. The singularity of
teed, the decision would be reduced to calculation and we couldn't the historical place-perhaps our own, which in any case is the one
call it just. That is why the ordeal of the undecidable that I just said I'm obscurely referring to here-allows us a glimpse of the type itself,
must be gone through by any decision worthy of the name is never as the origin, condition, possibility or promise of all its exemplifica-
past or passed, it is not a surmounted or sublated (aufgehoben) mo- tions (messianism of the Jewish, Christian or Islamic type, idea in the
ment in the decision. The undecidable remains caught, lodged, at least Kantian sense, eschato-teleology of the neo-Hegelian, Marxist or
as a ghost-but an essential ghost-in every decision, in every event post-Marxist type, etc.). It also allows us to perceive and conceive the
of decision. Its ghostliness deconstructsfrom within any assurance of law of irreducible competition (concurrence), but from a brink where
26/ The "Mystical FOUl1datiol1 of Authority" Jacques Den'ida / 27
vertigo threatens to seize us the moment we 'see nothing but examples be performatives that institute something or derived performatives
and some of us no longer feel engaged in it; another way of saying supposing anterior conventions. A constative can be juste (right), in
that from this point on we always run the risk (speaking for myself, the sense of justesse, never in the sense of justice. But as a performative
at least) of no longer being, as they say, "in the running" (dans la cannot be just, in the sense of justice, except by founding itself on
course). But not to be "in the running" on the inside track, does not conventions and so on other anterior performatives, buried or not, it
mean that we can stay at the starting-line or simply be spectators- always maintains within itself some irruptive violence, it no longer
far from it. It may be the very thing that "keeps us moving," (fait responds to the demands of theoretical rationality. Since every consta-
courir) with renewed strength and speed, for example, deconstruction. tive utterance itself relies, at least implicitly, on a performative struc-
3. Third aporia: the urgency that obstructs the horizon of knowl- ture ("I tell you that, I speak to you, I address myself to you to tell
edge. you that this is true, that things are like this, I promise you or renew
One of the reasons I'm keeping such a distance from all these hori- my promise to you to make a sentence and to sign what I say when I
zons-from the Kantian regulative idea or from the messianic advent, say that, tell you, or try to tell you the truth," and so forth), the di-
for example, or at least from their conventional interpretation-is mension of justesse or truth of the theoretico-constatie utterances (in
that they are, precisely, horizons. As its Greek name suggests, a hori- all domains, particularly in the domain of the theory of law) always
zon is both the opening and the limit that defines an infinite progress thus presupposes the dimension of justice of the performative utter-
or a period of waiting. ances, that is to say their essential precipitation, which never proceeds
But justice, however unpresentable it may be, doesn't wait. It is that without a certain dissymmetry and some quality of violence. That's
which must not wait. To be direct, simple and brief, let us say this: a how I would be tempted to understand the proposition of Levinas,
just decision is always required immediately, "right away." It cannot who, in a whole other language and following an en~irely different
furnish itself with infinite information and the unlimited knowledge discursive procedure, declares that "La verite suppose la justice"
of conditions, rules or hypothetical imperatives that could justify it. ("Truth supposes justice") ("Verite et justice," in Totalite et infini 3,
And even if it did have all that at its disposal, even if it did give itself p. 62). Dangerously parodying the French idiom, we could end up
the time, all the time and the necessary facts about the matter, the saying: "La justice; y a qu'qa de vrai." This is not without conse-
moment of decision, as such, always remains a finite moment of ur- quence, needless to say, for the status, if we still can call it that, of
-gency and precipitation, since it must not be the consequence or the truth.s
effect of this theoretical or historical knowledge, of this reflection or Paradoxically, it is because of this overflowing of the performative,
this deliberation, since it always marks the interruption of the because of this always excessive haste of interpretation getting ahead
juridico- or ethico- or politico-cognitive deliberation that precedes it, of itself, because of this structural urgency and precipitation of justice
that must precede it. The instant of decision is a madness, says Kier- that the latter has no horizon of expectation (regulative or messianic).
kegaard. This is particularly true of the instant of the just decision But for this very reason, it may have an avenir, a "to-come," which I
that must rend time and defy dialectics. It is a madness. Even if time rigorously distinguish from the future that can always reproduce the
and prudence, the patience of knowledge and the mastery of condi- present. Justice remains, is yet, to come, a venir, it has an, it is a-venir,
tions were hypothetically unlimited, the decision would be structur- the very dimension of events irreducibly to come. It will always have
ally finite, however late it came, a decision of urgency and precipita- it, this a-venir, and always has. Perhaps it is for this reason that justice,
tion, acting in the night of non-knowledge and non-rule. Not of the insofar as it is not only a juridical or political concept, opens up for
absence of rules and knowledge but of a reinstitution of rules which l'avenir the transformation, the recasting or refounding of law and
by definition is not preceded by any knowledge or by any guarantee politics. "Perhaps," one must always say perhaps for justice. There is
as such. If we were to trust in a massive and decisive distinction be- an aveni?' for justice and there is no justice except to the degree that
tween performative and constative-a problem I can't get involved in some event is possible which, as event, exceeds calculation, rules, pro-
here-we would have to attribute this irreducibility of precipitate ur- grams, anticipations and so forth. Justice as the experience of absolute
gency, at bottom this irreducibility of thoughtlessness and uncon- alterity is unpresentable, but it is the chance of the event and the con-
sciousness, however intelligent it may be, to the performative strllc:tur,e dition of history. No doubt an unrecognizable history, of course, for
of speech act and acts in general as acts of justice or law, whether they those who believe they know what they're talking about when they
28/ The "Mystical Foundation of Authority"
Jacques Derrida / 29
use this word, whether it's a matter of social, ideological, political,

the military use of scientific research, abortion, euthanasia, problems
juridical or some other history.
of organ transplant, extra-uterine conception, bio-engineering, medi-
That justice exceeds law and calculation, that the unpresenta~l~ ex-
cal experimentation, the social treatment of AIDS, the macro- or
ceeds the determinable cannot and should not serve as an ahbi for
micro-politics of drugs, the homeless, and so on, without forgetting,
staying out of juridico-political battles, within an insti~ution or a. stat~
of course, the treatment of what we call animal life, animality. On this
or between institutions or states and others. Left to Itself, the Incal-
last problem, the Benjamin text that I'm coming to now shows that
culable and giving (donatrice) idea of justice is always v~ry close to
its author was not deaf or insensitive to it, even if his propositions on
the bad, even to the worst for it can always be reappropnate~Lb)' !l1e
this subject remain quite obscure, if not quite traditional).
most perverse calculation. It's always possible. And so incalcul~ble
justice requires us to calculate. And first, closest to what we as~oclate
with justice, namely, law, the juridical field that one ~annot Isolate
within sure frontiers, but also in all the fields from whIch we cannot
separate it, which intervene in it and are no longer sim~ly fields: eth-
If I have not exhausted your patience, let us' now approach, in an-
ics, politics, economics, psycho-sociology, philosophy, hterature, etc.
other style, the promised reading of a brief and disconcerting Benja-
Not only must we calculate, negotiate the relation between the calcul-
min text. I am speaking of Zur Kritik der Gewalt (1921), translated
able and the incalculable, and negotiate without the sort of rule that
as Critique of Violence. I will not presume to call this text exemplary.
wouldn't have to be reinvented there where we are cast, there where
We are in a realm where, in the end, there are only singular examples.
we find ourselves; but we must take it as far as possible, beyond the
Nothing is absolutely exemplary. I will not attempt to justify abso-
place we find ourselves and beyond the a!r~ady. identifiable zon.es of
lutely the choice of this text. But I could say why it is not the worst
morality or politics or law, beyond the dIstInctIon be~een ~atIOnal
example of what might be exemplary in a relatively determined con-
and international, public and private, and so on. ThIS reqUIrement text such as ours.
does not properly belong either to justice or law. ~t only ?elo~gs to
1. Benjamin's analysis reflects the crisis in the European model of
either of these two domains by exceeding each one In the dIrectIOn of
bourgeois, liberal, parliamentary democracy, and so the crisis in the
the other. Politicization, for example, is interminable even if it cannot
concept of droit that is inseparable from it. Germany in defeat is at
and should not ever be total. To keep this from being a truism or a
this time a place in which this crisis is extremely sharp, a crisis whose
triviality, we must recognize in it the following consequence: .each ad-
originality also comes from certain modern features like the right to
vance in politicization obliges one to reconsider, and so to reInterpret
strike, the concept of the general strike (with or without reference to
the very foundations of law such as they ha~ previously b~en calcu-
Sorel). It is also the aftermath of a war and a pre-war that saw the
lated or delimited. This was true for example In the DeclaratIOn of the
European development and failure of pacifist discourse, anti-
Rights of Man, in the abolition of slavery, in all the emancipato:-y
militarism, the critique of violence, including juridico-police violence,
battles that remain and will have to remain in progress, everywhere In
which will soon be repeated in the years to follow. It is also the mo-
the world for men and for women. Nothing seems to me less outdated
ment in which questions of the death penalty and of the right to pun-
than the dlassical emancipatory ideal. We cannot attempt to disqualify
ish in general are painfully current. Change in the structures of public
it today, whether crudely or with sophistication, a~ l~~st not without
opinion, thanks to the appearance of new media powers such as radio,
treating it too lightly and forming the worst comphcIties. But beyond
begins to put into question this liberal model of parliamentary discus-
these identified territories of juridico-politicization on the grand geo-
sion or deliberation in the production of laws and so forth. Such con-
political scale, beyond all self-serving interpretations~ beyond all de-
ditions motivated the thoughts of German jurists like Carl Schmitt, to
termined and particular reappropriations of internatIOnal law, othe~
mention only him. And so I was also interested by several historical
areas must constantly open up that at first can seem like secondary or
indices. For example, this text, at once "mystical" (in the overdeter-
marginal areas. This marginality also signifies that a violence, indeed
mined sense that interests us here) and hypercritical, this text which,
a terrorism and other forms of hostage-taking are at work (the ex-
in certain respects, can be read as neo-messianical Jewish mysticism
amples closest to us would be found in the area of laws on the teach-
(mystique) grafted onto post-Sorelian neo-Marxism (or the reverse),
ing and practice of languages, the legitimization of canons,
upon its publication won Benjamin a letter of congratulations from
Carl Schmitt, that great conservative Catholic jurist, still a constitu-
First, there is the distinction between two kinds of violence in law.
tionalist at the time' but you are already familiar with his strange
in relation to law (droit): the founding violence, the one that institute~
conversion to Hitlerism in 1933 and his correspondence with Benja-
and posit~ons law (die rechtsetzende Gewalt, "law making violence")
min. But also with Heidegger. As for analogies between Zur Kritik der
and the vlOlence that conserves, the one that maintains, confirms, in-
Gewalt and certain turns of Heideggerian thought, they are impos-
sures the permanence and enforceability of law (die rechtserhaltende
sible to miss, especially those surrounding t.he n:o~ifs ~f Walten ~.nd
Gewalt, "law preserving violence"). For the sake of convenience let
Gewalt. Zur Kritik der Gewalt concludes with dlVlne vlOlence (gott-
~s continue to translate Gewalt as violence, but I have already ~en
liche Gewalt) and in the end Walter says of divine violence that we
tioned the precautions this calls for. As for translating Recht as "law"
might call it die waltende (Die gottliche Gewalt .. : maft. die wa,~t:,nde
rather than "right," as in the published version I'm using here, that is
hei(Sen): "Divine violence ... may be called sovereign.vlOI,enc~. : .. another problem that I'll leave aside for now.
die waltende hei(Sen" are the last words of the text. It is thiS histoncal
Next there is the distinction between the founding violence of law
network of equivocal contracts that interests ,me in its nece~sity and
termed "mythic" (implicit meaning: Greek, it seems to me) and the
in its very dangers. In the Western democracies of 198~, with work
annihilating violence of destructive law (Rechtsvernichtend), which is
and a certain number of precautions, lessons can still be drawn
ter~ed "divine" (implicit meaning: Jewish, it seems to me).
from it.
2. Keeping in mind the thematic of our colloquiuI?' this t~xt seemed
~i~ally, there is the distinction between justice (Gerechtigkeit) as the
pnnciple of all divine positioning of the end (das Prinzip aller gottli-
exemplary to me, up to a point, to the degree that it lends itself to an
, chen Zwecksetzung, p. 198, "principle of all divine end making," p.
exercise in de constructive reading, as I shall try to show.
295) and P?wer (Macht) as principle of mythical positioning of droit
3. But this deconstruction is in some way the operation or rather
(aller mythlschen Rechtsetzung, "of all mythical law making, ibid.).
the very experience that this text, it seems to me, first does itself" by
In the tit~e "Zur Kritik der Gewalt," "critique" doesn't simply
itself on itself. What does this mean? Is it possible? What remams,
mean negative evaluation, legitimate rejection or condemnation of
then' of such an event? Of its auto-hetero-deconstruction? Of its just
vi?lence, but judgment, evaluation, examination that provides itself
and 'unjust incompletion? What is the ruin of such an e:ent or the
wIth the means to judge violence. The concept of "critique," insofar
open wound of such a signature? And also, in what d~es ,ItS s,trength
as it implies decision in the form of judgment and question with re-
consist, strength precisely in the sense of Gewalt, ,that is, ,itS vlOle~ce,
gard to the right to judge, thus has an essential relation in itself to
authority and legitimacy? That is one of my questlOns. It is a questi?n
t he ~p,here of law or right. Fundamentally, something like' the Kantian ,
about the possibility of deconstruction. If yo,u will allow me to, cite
myself, I happened to write that "the most ngorous deconstructlOns
tradI~lOn of the concept of critique. The concept of violence (Gewalt)
permIts an evaluative critique only in the sphere of law and justice
have never claimed to be ... possible. And I would say that decon-
(Recht, Gerechtigkeit) or the sphere of moral relations (sittliche Ver-
struction loses nothing from admitting that it is impossible; and a,lso
that those who would rush to delight in that admission lose nothmg
halt~isse). Th,ere is no natural or physical violence. We can speak fig-
urati~ely of VIOlence with regard to an earthquake or even to a physi-
from having to wait. For a deconstructive operation ~ossibility would
cal ailment. But we know that these aren't cases of a Gewalt able to
rather be the danger, the danger of becoming an available s~t of rule-
give, rise to a judgment, before some instrument of justice. The concept
governed procedures, methods, accessi?le ap~roaches. Th~ mterest ?f
of vI~le?ce belongs to the symbolic order of law, politics and morals.
deconstruction, of such force and desire as it may have, is a certam
AI:d It ,IS onl! to, t?is extent that it can give rise to a critique. Up to
experience of the impossible."7 "
Benjamin's demonstration concerns the questlOn of drott, rech~,
~IS POInt thIS cntique was always inscribed in the space of the dis-
tinctlOn between means and end. But, objects Benjamin, to ask our-
right or law. It even means to inaugurate, we shall be able to, say ~t
sel~es if violence can be a means with a view toward ends (just or
more rigorously in a moment, a "philosoph~ of dr~it.," A,nd this phi-
~nJust) is to prohibit ourselves from judging violence itself The criter-
losophy seems to be organized around a senes of dis~mcti?ns that all
lOlogy would then concern only the application of violence not vio-
seem interesting, provocative, necessary up to a certam pomt but that
lence itself. We would not be able to tell if the latter as m:ans is in
all, it seems to me, remain radically problematic.
itself just or not, moral or not. The critical question r;mains ope~, the
32 / The "Mystical Foundation of Authority"
Jacques Derrida 133
question of an evaluation and a justific~tion of violence in itself, violence claims to exceed the two trad' ,
whether it be a simple means and whatever its end may be. This crit- simply from the s here of la I:IOns an~ no longer to arise
ical dimension would have been foreclosed by the jusnaturalist tradi- juridical institutio~. It belon; ~~:.~: I~tern~l I?terpretation, of the
tion. For defenders of natural droit, recourse to violent means poses sense a "philosophy of histor" d' t e ca ~ I,n ~ rather ,sIngular
no problems, since natural ends are just. Recourse to violent means is particulars. y an IS expressly lImIted to European
as justified, as normal as man's "right" to move his body to reach a At its most fundament I l i E
given goal. Violence (Gewalt) is from this point of view a "natural , dividual violence and to :on~ve, ~ropeabn law tends to prohibit in-
product" (Naturprodukt). Benjamin gives several examples of this this or that law but becau ,emn It not ecause it poses a threat to
naturalization of violence by jusnaturalism: Rechtsordnung, "the Ie al se It th:,eatens the juridical order itself (die
does have an interest ingla:i~s:~~eii ~~:nce the law's ~nte~est-forJt
(a)the state founded on natural law, which Spinoza talks about representing the interest that ' t ' and conservIng Itself, or In
in the Theological-Political Treatise in which the citizen, be- may seem" " " h .' JUs ement, It represents. Law's interest
, , , surpnsIng, t at IS Benjamin' db,
fore a contract is formed by reason, exercises de jure a vio- It IS In its nature as interest d' h' s wor, u,t at the same tIme
lence he disposes of de facto, ing here at all, to pretend ~oa~x~~~eI:~en~e t?~re IS n?thing surpris-
(b) the ideological foundation of the Terror under the French ening its order and thus to r y IndIvIdual VIOlence threat-
walt h' h' 1 monopo Ize violence, in the sense of Ge- '
Revolution, , w IC IS a so to say authorit L h '"
monopoly of violence" ( y. aw as an Interest in a
(c) the exploitations of a certain Darwinism (and this could ''d p. 281), (Interesse des Rechts an der M
Pa IlSlerung el' Gewalt).'This mono 01 " ono-
later be applied to Nazism), etc.
~nd (Rechtszwe:kerb~~~::\:::~Ie;~,protect ~~y
But if, in opposition to jusnaturalism, the tradition of positive law
•
given just legal ends
r
a tautologIcal triviality. But isn't tautology th e h .' IS ems I e
of a ,certain violence in the law that lays itself !o;~o~e~a str~cture
is more attentive to the historical evolution of law, it also falls short be VIOlent, this time in the sense of
Out1 ' Y ecreeIng to
of the critical questioning called for by Benjamin. Doubtless it can recognize it? Performative tautolo ~~ a ,a~ anyon~ who, does not
only consider all means to be good once they conform to a natural tures any foundation of the 1 gy hP,rzon syntheSIS, whIch struc-
and ahistorical end. It prescribes that we judge means, that is to say duce h ' aw upon w Ich one performatively ro-
judge their conformity to a droit that is in the process of being insti- than~st t~ ~~iv~ntIOns ~hat guarantee the validity of the performa~ve
tuted, to a new (not natural) droit that it evaluates in terms of means, and illegal vio~en~~.e !~:e~:p~:::~~:~e,,~e:ns to ~ecide ,~etw~en,legai
and so by the critique of means. But the two traditions share the same thesis," and especially the word "p L t~lo¥'y and a pnon syn-
, dogmatic presupposition, namely, that just ends can be attained by but I '1 I venture to suggest that th erlOrmative
db'
are not B ' "
enjamInlan,
just means. "Natural law attempts, by the justness of ends (durch die Th d " ey 0 not etray hIS purposes
e a mIrIng fascination exerted on the eo Ie b " .
Gerechtigkeit der Zwecke), to 'justify' (rechtfertigen) the means, pos- P
"great' criminal" . 281) (d'ze G esta It d "P
, (p y the
" figure of the
itive law to 'guarantee' (garantieren) the justness of the ends through can be explained as follows' 't' es grossen Verbrechers),
the justification (Gerechtigkeit) of the means." The two traditions or that crime for which o~eI f IS lnot someone w~o ~as committed this
would turn in the same circle of dogmatic presuppositions. And there who, in defyin the law la ee s a se~ret admIratIOn; it is someone
is no solution for the antinomy when a contradiction emerges between juridical order 1tself. O~e ~~~~re th~ :IO,len~e of the legal system, the
just ends and justified means. Positive law would remain blind to the tion exerted in France b a 1 exp ~In In t e same way the fascina-
unconditionality of ends, natural right to the conditionality of means. the most difficult causes ~h awye~ lIdkef Ja~que~ Verges who defends
Nevertheless, although he seems to dismiss both cases symmetrically, , , , e most In e enslble In th f h
jorrty, ~y practicing what he calls the "strate of e eyes 0" t e m,a-
from the tradition of positive law Benjamin retains the sense of the the radIcal contestation of t h ' d gy rupture, that IS,
I historicity of law. Inversely, it is true that what he says further on '
th orrty e gIven or er of the la f' d' , 1
and ultimately of th 1 " h' w, 0 jU !CIa au-
about divine justice is not always incompatible with the theological • h" e egltlmate aut onty of the state that sum
,IS clIents
h '1 auth
to appear before the la'" J Ud'ICla ' bef -
onty
basis of all jusnaturalisms. In any case, the Benjaminian critique of
In s art, the accused appears without appearing and claims ~~:
¥Y.
, Jacques Derrida / 35
afraid
. of fundame n t a,I foun d'mg vIOlence
, th ' '1
right to contest the order of right or law. But what order of law? The tlfy, to legitimate (begrunden "t f d;' at IS, VIO ence able to jus- '
order of law in general or this order of law instituted and enforced by relations of law'(Rechtsve h~'lt ~ oU~I' p. 283) or to transform the
, r a msse 'egal d" " ,
this state? Or order as inextricably mixed with the state in general? present Itself as having a right to l:-w Th' c?n ItIOns ), and so to
The telling example would here be that of the right to strike. In class advance to the order of a droit th . IS, VIOlence thus belongs in
at remar~s ~o be transformed or
struggle, notes Benjamin, the right to strike is guaranteed to workers
who are therefore, besides the state, the only legal subject (Rechtssub-
founded, even if it may wou d
fuhl). Only this violence ca~s ?ur se~se °t JustIce ,(Gerechtigkeitsge-
violence" that determines 't t ~r an rna es possIble a "critique of
jekt) to find itself guaranteed a right to violence (Recht auf Gewalt)
and so to share the monopoly of the state in this respect. Certain exercise of force. For a critII' 0 e s~mlething other than the natural
, que 0 f VIO ence-th t ' ,
people may have thought that since the practice of the strike, this ces- pretatlve and meaningful eva IuatIOn ' f '
0 It-tO b
a IS to'blsay, an mter-
sation of activity, this Nicht-Handeln, is not an action, we cannot here fi rst recognize meaning I'n a VIO 'I ence th at 'IS t e POSSI 'de, one must
be speaking about violence. That is how the concession of this right rom outside Ia-w That wh' h h no an aCCI ent arriving
f ' . lC t reatens lawaI d b I '
by the power of the state (Staatsgewalt) is justified when that power th e rrght to law (droit) to the 1 f h 1 rea ,y e ongs to It, to '
cannot do otherwise. Violence would come from the employer and the law (droit). The gene~al strik:~ho t ~ a:v (drott), to the origin of
strike would consist only in an abstention, a non-violent withdrawal thread, since it exercises the co ;sd ,r~Ishes a valuable guiding
by which the worker, suspending his relations with the management existing law and to create ~ce, e rrg ,t to, contest the order of
will be to found a new d oa 'tre~fo utIOn ary SItuatIOn in which the task
and its machines, would simply become alien to them. The man who r t, 1 not always as h 11 '
will become Brecht's friend defines this withdrawal (Abkehr) as an ment, a new state . All re vo IutIOnary
' "
situat' weII s a see' m a mo-
"Entfremdung" ("estrangement"). He puts the word in quotation courses, on the left or on th e rrg 'h t (an d from IOns,
1921a revolutIOnary
' G dis-
marks. But Benjamin clearly does not believe in the non-violence of were many of these that resembl d h h ' ' m ermany, there
the strike. The striking workers set the conditions for the resumption Benjamin often finding hI'mself b e eac hot er m a troubling way,
, etween t e two)' 'fy h
of work, they will not end their strike unless a list, an order of things to VIOlence by alleging the found" JUSti t e recourse
has changed. And so there is violence against violence. In carrying the law. As this law to come will' mg, m pr~~ress or to come, of a new
right to strike to its limit, the concept or watchword of general strike violence that may offend th m retu~n l~gItl,mate, retrospectively, the
thus manifests its essence. The state can hardly stand this passage to justifies it. The foundation e~;~~f ~f JustIce, ItS ~ture ,ante:ior already -
the limit. It deems it abusive and claims that there was a misunder- can thus call revolutionary It ' ates occurs In a SItuatIOn that we
, , . maugurates a new I ' 1
standing, a misinterpretation of the original intention, and that das so In VIOlence . Always , wh'ICh IS ' to say eve h aw, h It ha ways does
Streikrecht "so" nicht gemeint gewesen sei, "the right to strike was th ose spectacular genocI'des-, expu1SIOns ' or ndep went t ' ere haven't been
not 'so intended''', (p. 282). It can then condemn the general strike as accompany the foundatio f or atIOns t at so often
near us or far away. n 0 states, great or small, old or new, right
illegal and, if the strike persists, we have a revolutionary situation.
Such a situation is in fact the only one that allows us to conceive the In these situations said to found la (d '
homogeneity of law or right and violence, violence as the exercise of cal category of the future a t ' IW rott) or state, the grammati-
, n error a I too well bl
droit and droit as the exercise of violence. Violence is not exterior to tlon of the present to d 'b h ' , resem es a modifica-
. " escn e t e VIOlence '
the order of droit. It threatens it from within. Violence does not con- precIsely, In feIgning the presence or SImple
' Ind progress.
I' , It conSIsts '
sist essentially in exerting its power or a brutal force to obtain this or _ ose who say "our time" h'l h' ki mo a IzatIOn of presence.
Th ' w 1 e t m ng "our '" I'
that result but in threatening or destroying an order of given right and fu ture anterior present do not k present mIght of a
precisely, in this case, the order of state law that was to accord this are saying. It is precisely in th ?o:v
very well, by definition, what they
right to violence, for example the right to strike. How can we interpret event consists what we naI' I IS IIgnl,orance that8 the eventness of the
Th' ve y ca ItS presence.
this contradiction? Is it only de facto and exterior to law? Or is it ese moments, supposing we can isolate h ' ,
rather immanent in the law of law (au droit du droit)? Because of the suff' h ' t em, are ternfyIng mo-
What the state fears (the state being law in its greatest force) is not , to accompany them n~r~:gsbtt ~ cr,Imes, the tortures that rarely
and in th' u', ut just as much because they are
so much crime or brigandage, even on the grand scale of the Mafia or
heavy drug traffic, as long as they transgress the law with an eye to- That is what I : : ~:f~ vI?lence? uninterpretable or indeci- i
ng mystIque." As Beniamin nrp<;pnt~
ward particular benefits, however important they may be. The state is
near us or far from us, right here or elsewhere, whether it's a question
it this violence is certainly legible, indeed intelligible since it is not
alien to law, no more than polemos or eris is alien to all the ~orm~ and
of what .happens from one neighborhood to another, one street to
another m a great metropolis or from one country or one camp to
significations of dike. But it is, in droit, what s~spends droit. It mter-
another around a world war in the course of which states and nations
rupts the established droit to found a~other. ThIs moment of ~us?ense,
this epokhe, this founding or revolutionary mome~t of law IS, m la",:"
are founded, destroyed or redesigned. This must be taken into account
an instance of non-law. But it is also the whole hIstory of law. Th~s in order to de-limit an international law constructed on the western
concept of state sovereignty and non-intervention, but also in order to
moment always takes place and never takes plac: in a presence: It IS
the moment in which the foundation of law remams susp~nded m the
think its infinite perfectibility. There are cases in which it is not known
void or over the abyss, suspended by a pure performative act t~at ~~r ~e.nera:!ons if the performative of. the violent founding of a state is
fehcItou~. or not: Here we could CIte more than one example. This
would not have to answer to or before anyone. The supposed subject
of this pure performative would no longer be before the law, or rather unreadabIhty of VIOlence results from the very readability of a vio-
he would be before a law not yet determined, before the law as befo~e lence that belongs to what others would call the symbolic order of
a law not yet existing, a law yet to come, encore devant et devant vent:. law, if you like, and not to pure physics. We might be tempted to
9
And the being "before the law" that Kafka talks about resembles thIS reverse this "l~gic" like a glove ("logic" in quotation marks, for this
"~n~eadable" IS also very much "illogical" in the order of logos, and
situation, both ordinary and terrible, of the man who cannot ma~a~e
~h~s IS also why I hesitate to call it "symbolic" and precipitately send
to see or above all to touch, to catch up to the law: because. It IS
transcendent in the very measure that it is he who must ~ound .It, as It mto the order of Lacanian discourse), the "logic" of this readable
unread~bili~y. In sum, it signifies a juridico-symbolic violence, a per-
yet to come, in violence. Here we "touch" without touchmg thIS ex-
traordinary paradox: the inaccessible transcendence of the la:v be.fore formatIve VIOlence at the very heart of interpretative reading. And the
which and prior to which "man" stands fast only appears mfi~Itel! example or index could be carried by metonymy back toward the con-
transcendent and thus theological to the extent that,. so ne~r h~m, It
ceptual generality of the essence. .
depends only on him, on the performative ~ct by whIch he. mstitutes We might s~y t~en tha.t there is a possibility of general strike, a right
it: the law is transcendent, violent and non-VIOlent, because It depen~s
to general strIke many mterpretative reading, the right to contest es-
only on who is before it-and so prior to it, o~ who produces It, tablished law in its strongest authority, the law of the state. One has
. the right to suspend legitimating authority and all its norms of read-
founds it, authorizes it in an absolute performative who~e presence
always escapes him. The law is transcenden.t ~n~ theologIcal, .and so . ~nd to d? this in the most incisive, most effective, most pertinent
always to come, always promised, because It. IS I~manent.' fimte and
. whIch of course will sometimes argue with the unreadable
ill order to found another order of reading, another state, sometimes
so already past. Every "subject" is caught up m thIS aporetic structure
for we shall see that Benjamin distinguishes between two sorts of
in advance. . .. , . strikes, some destined to replace the order of one state with
Only the yet-to-come (avenir) will produce i~tell~g!bIlIty or I~ter-
"n"T ...." • .(gener~l political strike), the other to abolish the state (general
pretability of this law. Beyond the letter of BenJamm s text, whIch I
stopped following in the style of ~omm~ntary a. moment ago but
strike). In short, the two temptations of deconstruction.
which I am interpreting from the pomt of ItS aventr, one c~n say that
For there is something of the general strike, and thus of the revolu-
the order of intelligibility depends in its turn on the establ.Ished order situation in every reading that founds something new and that
that it serves to interpret. This readability will then be as lIttle neutral unreadable in regard to established canons and norms of
as it is non-violent. A "successful" revolution, the "successful foun- tha.t is to s~y the ~resent state of reading or of what figures
dation of a state" (in somewhat the same sense that one speaks of ~ State, WIth a capItal S, m the state of possible reading. Faced with
"felicitous performative speech act") will produce apres .coup wha~ It
a general strike, we can in various cases speak of anarchism,
was destined in advance to produce, namely, proper mterpretat~v.e :keIJti(:isrn. nihilism, depoliticization, or on the contrary of subversive
models to read in return, to give sense, necessity and above ~lllegItI fJU'HH..H , d · • Today, the general strike does not need to demobi-
macy to the violence that has produced, among ~thers, the. I.nter~re or mobilize a spectacular number of people: it is enough to cut
tative model in question, that is, the discours.e o~ ItS self-legitImat~on. electri.city in a few privileged places, for example the services, pub-
Examples of this circle, this other hermeneutIC CIrcle, are not lackmg, and prIvate, of postal service and telecommunications, of radio and
38/ The "Mystic;al Foundation of Authority" Jacques Derrida / 39
television or to introduce a few efficient 'viruses into a well-chosen would also lack the technical criteria for such a distinction) , nor, in
computer network or, by analogy, to introduce the equivalent of AIDS ?orel's .sense, between a general political strike and a general proletar-
into the organs of transmission, into the hermeneutic Gesprach. 10 Ian stnke. Deconstruction is also the idea of-and the idea adopted
Can what we are doing here resemble a general strike or a revolu- by necessity of-this differantielle contamination. It is in thinking
tion, with regard to models, structures but also modes of readability about this differantielle contamination, as the contamination at the
of political action? Is that what deconstruction is? Is it a general strike very heart of law that I single out this sentence of Benjamin's, which I
or a strategy of rupture? Yes and no. Yes, to the extent that it assumes hope to come back to later: there is, he says "something rotten in law"
the right to contest, and not only theoretically, constitutional proto- (p. 286) (etwas Morsches im Recht). Then, is something decayed or .
cols, the very charter that governs reading in our culture and espe- rotten in law, which condemns it or ruins it in advance. Law is con-
cially in the academy. No, at least to the extent that it is in the acad- demned, ruined, in ruins, ruinous, if we can risk a sentence of death
emy that it has been developed (and let's not forget, if we do not wish ot
on the subject of law, especially when it's a question the death pen-
to sink into ridicule or indecency, that we are comfortably installed alty. And it is in a passa,ge on the death penalty that Benjamin speaks
here on Fifth Avenue-only a few blocks away from the inferno of of what is "rotten" in law.
injustice). And besides, just as a strategy of rupture is never pure, since If there is something of strike and the right to strike in every inter-
the lawyer or the accused has to "negotiate" it in some way before a pretation, there is also war and polemos. War is another example of
tribunal or in the course of a hunger strike in the prison, so there is this contradiction internal to law (Recht or dmit). There is a droit de
never a pure opposition between the general political strike looking to fa guerre (Schmitt will complain that it is no longer recognized as the
re-found another state and the general proletarian strike looking to very possibility Qf politics). This dmit involves the same contradiction
destroy the state. as the dmit de greve. Apparently subjects of this dmit declare war in
And so these Benjaminian oppositions seem to me to call more than order to sanction a violence whose object seems natural (the 'other
ever for deconstruction; they deconstruct themselves, even as para- wants to lay hold of territory, goods, women; .he wants my death, I
digms for deconstruction. What I am saying here is anything but con- ~ill him). But this warlike violence that resembles "brigandage" out-
servative and anti-revolutionary. For beyond Benjamin's explicit pur- SIde the law (l'aubende Gewalt, "predatory violence," p. 283) is al-
pose, I shall propose the interpretation according to which the very ways deployed within the sphere of law. It is an anomaly within the
violence of the foundation or position of law (Rechtsetzende Gewalt) legal system with which it seems to break. Here the rupture of the
. must envelop the violence of conservation (Rechtserhaltende Gewalt) relation is the relation. The transgression is before the law. In so-called
and cannot break with it. It belongs to the structure of fundamental primitive societies, where these meanings would be more clearly
violence that it calls for the repetition of itself and founds what ought brought out, the peace settlement shows very well that war was not a
to be conserved, conservable, promised to heritage and tradition, to natural phenomenon. No peace is settled without the symbolic phe-
be shared. A foundation is a promise. Every position (Setzung) permits nomenon of a ceremonial. It recalls the fact that there was already
and promises (permet et pm-met), it positions en mettant et en pm- ceremony in war. War, then, did not simply amount to a clash of two
mettant. And even if a promise is not kept in fact, iterability inscribes interests or of two purely physical forces. Here an important paren-
the promise as guard in the most irruptive instant of foundation. Thus thesis emphasizes that, to be sure, in the pair war/peace, the peace
. it inscribes the possibility of repetition at the heart of the originary. ceremonial recalls the fact that the war was also an unnatural phe-
With this, there is no more a pure foundation or pure position of law, nomenon; but Benjamin apparently wants to withhold a certain
and so a pure founding violence, than there is a purely conservative meaning of the word "peace" from this c.orrelation, in particular in
violence. Position is already iterability, a call for self-conserving repe-' the Kantian concept of "perpetual peace." Here it is a question of a
tition. Conservation in its turn refounds, so that it can conserve what' whole other "unmetaphorical and political" (unmetaphorische und
it claims to found. Thus there can be no rigorous opposition between politische) signification, the importance of which we may weigh in a
positioning and conservation, only what I will call (and Benjamin does . moment. At stake is international law, where the risks of diversion or
not name it) a differantielle contamination between the two, with all perversion for the benefit of individual interests (whether those of a
the paradoxes that this may lead to. No rigorous distinction between state or not) require an infinite vigilance, all the more so as these risks
a general strike and a partial strike (again, in an industrial society, we are inscribed in its very constitution.
Jacques Derrida I 41
ungraspab~e revolutionary instant that belongs to no historical tem-

After the ceremony of war, the ceremony of peace signifies that the poral contI~uum but in which the foundation of a new law ne:erthe-
victory establishes a new law. And war, which passes for originary ~ess plays, If we may say so, on something from an anterior law that
and archetypal (ursprungliche und urbildliche, "primordial and par- It extends, ra~icalizes, deforms, metaphorizes or metonymizes, this
adigmatic," p. 283) violence in pursuit of natural ends, is in fact a figure here takI.ng t.he name of war or general strike. But this figure is
violence that serves to found law or right (rechtsetzende, "law mak- a!so a contammatIOn. I~ effaces or blurs the distinction, pure and
ing"). From the moment that this ~ositive, ~ositional (setzende) a~d ~Imp~e,. be~e~n fo~n.datIOn a?d con~ervation. It inscribes iterability
founding character of another law IS recogmzed, modern law (droIt) III ongm~nty, m umcIt! and smgulanty, and it is what I will call de-
refuses the individual subject all right to violence. The people's shud- cons~ructI~n at work, m full negotiation: in the "things themselves"
der of admiration before the "great criminal" is addressed to the in- and m BenJamin's text.
dividual who takes upon himself, as in primitive times, the stigma of . As long as they do not give themselves the theoretical or philosoph-
the lawmaker or the prophet. But the distinction between the two Ic~l. means to ~hink. this co-implication of violence and law, the usual
types of violence (founding and conserving) will. be v~ry diffi~ult to cn~Iques remam naIve and ineffectual. Benjamin does not hide his dis-
trace, to found or to conserve. We are going to WItnesS an ambIguouS daI~ for th~ d~clam~ti?ns of pacifist activism and for the procla-
and laborious movement on Benjamin's part to preserve at any cost a ~a:I~ns of qUIte chIldIsh anarchism" that would like to exempt the
distinction or a correlation without which his whole project could IlldIv~dua~, fron: all constraints. The reference to the categorical im-
collapse. For if violence is at the origin of law, we must take. the c.ri- ~erative ( Act In such a way that at all times you use humanity both
tique of this double violence ("lawmaking and law-preservmg VIO- III your person and in the person of all others as an end and never
lence," p. 386) to its logical conclusion. .., merel.r. as a mea.ns," ,po 285), However uncontestable it rna; be, allows
To discuss the conservative violence of law, BenJamm stICks to rela- no c:ntique of VIOlence. Law (droit) in its very violence claims to rec-
tively modern problems, as modern as t~e problem of the g~~eral ogmze and defend said humanity as end, in the person of each individ-
strike was a moment ago. Now it is a questIon of compulsory mIlItary ~al. And so a purely moral critique of violence is as unjustified as it is
service, the modern police or the abolition of the death penalty. If, Impot~nt. For the sa~e reason, we cannot provide a critique of vio-
during and after World War I, an impassioned critiqu~ of violence ~as 1enc:e I? ,:h:, name of lIberty, of what Benjamin here calls "gestaltlose
developed, it took aim this time at the law-conservmg for~ o.f VIO- FreIheIt, formles~ freedom," that is, in short, purely formal, as
lence. Militarism, a modern concept that supposes the explOItatIOn of empty form, followmg a Marxist-Hegelian vein that is far from absent
compulsory military service, is the forced use of force, the compelling throughout this ~editation. These attacks against violence lack perti-
(Zwang) to use force or violence (Gewalt) in the service of the state nence and. effectIveness because they remain alien to the juridical es-
and its legal ends. Here military violence is legal and conserves the . of VI?~enCe, to the Rechtsordnung, the order of law (droit). An
law: and thus it is more difficult to criticize than the pacifists and ac- ,ptlb"~";HO c~It1~ue must lay ~he blame on the body of droit itself, in its
. tivi~ts believe; Benjamin does not hide his low esteem for these declai- and In ItS members, m the laws and the particular usages that
mers. The ineffectiveness and inconsistency of anti-military pacifists ", adopts ~nder protection of its power (Macht). This order is such
results from their failure to recognize the legal and unassailable char- that there eXists one unique fate or history (nur ein einziges Schicksal
acter of this violence that conserves the law. one fate," p. 285). That is one of the key. concepts of the text:
Here we are dealing with a double bind or a contradiction that can al~o one of the most obscure, whether it's a question of fate itself
be schematized as follows. On the one hand, it appears easier to crit- of ItS absolute uniqueness. That which exists, which has consist-
icize the violence that founds since it cannot be justified by any pre- (das Bestehende) and that which at the same time threatens what
existing legality and so appears savage. But on the other hand, and (das D.rohende) belong inviolably (unverbruchlich) to the same
this reversal is the whole point of this reflection, it is more difficult, an~ t~IS order is in~iolable because it is unique. It can only be
more illegitimate to criticize this same violence since one cannot sum- In Itself. The notIOn of threat is important here but also dif-
mon it to appear before the institution of any preexisting law: it does for the threat doesn't come from outside. Law is both threat-,
not recognize existing law in the moment that i~ founds an.other. Be:- and threatened by itself. This threat is neither intimidation nor
tween the two limits of this contradiction, there IS the questIon of thIS
dissuasion, as pacifists, anarchists or activists believe. The law turns

out to be threatening in the way fate is threatening. To reach the da~s is to s~y nearly all the time. The police are ignoble because in
"deepest meaning" of the indeterminacy (Unbestimmtheit, "uncer- theIr authonty "the separation of the violence that founds and the
violence that conserves is suspended" (in ihr die Trennung von recht-
tainty," p. 285) of the legal threat (der Rechtsdrohung), it ,,:,i~llater ~e
i necessary to meditate upon the essence of fate at the ongm of thIS
setz~nder und rechtserhaltender Gewalt aufgehoben ist, "in this au-
threat. thonty the sel:'aration of lawmaking and lawpreserving is suspended,"
In the course of a meditation on fate, which includes along the way p. 286). In thIS Aufhebung that it itself is, the policeinvent law, they
an analysis of the police, the death penalty, the parli~n:ent~ry ~nstitu mak~ t~emselves "rechtsetzend," "lawmaking," legislative, each time
tion, Benjamin thus comes to distinguish between dIvme JustIce and law IS. mdeterminate enough to give them the chance. The police be-
human justice, between the divine justice that destroys law and the have. lIke lawmakers in modern times, not to say lawmakers of mod-
mythic violence that founds it. ern tImes. Where there are police, which is to say everywhere and even
The violence that conserves ("law-preserving violence"), this threat here., we can no longer discern between two types of violence, con-
which is not intimidation, is a threat of droit. Double genitive: it both servI.ng .and founding, and that is the ignoble, ignominious, disgusting
comes from and threatens droit. A valuable index arises here from the a.mbigUlty. The possibility, which is also to say the ineluctable neces-
domain of the right to punish and the death penalty. Benjamin seems SIty of the m?~ern. police force ruins, in sum, one could say decon-
structs, the dIstmctlOn between the two kinds of violence that never-
to think that the arguments against the droit de pun~r and notably
against the death penalty are ~uperficial, an~ ~ot by aCCIdent: F~r they
t~eless structure the -discourse that Benjamin calls a new critique of
VIOlence. He would like either to found it or conserve it but in all
do not admit an axiom essentlal to the defimtIOn of law. WhIch. Well,
when one tackles the death penalty, one doesn't dispute one pen~l~y purity he ~an do neither. At most, he can sign it as a spectral event.
Text and SIgnature are specters. And Benjamin knows it, so well that
among others but law itself in its origin, in its.very ?rder.. If the ongm
of law is a violent positioning, the latter mamfests Itself m the purest the .e~ent of the text Zur Kritik der Gewalt consists of this strange ex-
fashion when violence is absolute, that is to say when it touches on pOSItIOn: before your eyes a demonstration ruins the distinctions it i
the right to life and to death. Here Benjamin does~'t need t? in~oke
~roposes .. It ~xhibits and archivizes the very movement of its implo-
SIOn, leavmg mstead what we call a text, the ghost of a text that itself
the great philosophical arguments that before hIm have JustI~ed,
in the same way, the death penalty (Kant, Hegel, for example, agamst in ruins, ~t once foundation and conservation, accomplishes ;either
and remams there, up to a certain point, for a certain amount of time,
early opponents like Beccaria). . ...
readable and unreadable, like the exemplary ruin that singularly
If the legal system fully manifests itself m the possIbIhty of t~e de~t~
.warns us of the fate of all texts and all signatures in their relation to
penalty, to abolish the penalty is not to. t~uch upon one dtSp~stttf
law, that is, necessarily, in their relation to a certain police force. Such
among others, it is to .disavow the v.ery pnnciple ~f la_w~ ~nd that IS to
confirm, says Benjamm, that there IS somethmg rotten. at the heart would be (let it be said in passing) the status without statute the stat-
ute without status of a text considered deconstructive and' what re-
of law. The death penalty bears witness, it must bear WItness, to the
fact that law is a violence contrary to nature. But what today bears mains of it. The text does not escape the law that it states. It is ruined
. contaminated, it becomes the specter of itself. But about this ruin
witness in an even more "spectral" (gespenstiche) way in mixin? th.e of signature, there will be more to say.
two forms of violence (conserving and founding) is the modern mstl-
tution of the police. It is this mixture (Vermischung) that is spectra!, ~at thr~atens the rigor of the distinction between the two types
as if one vioience haunted the other (though Benjamin doesn't put It vIO~e~ce IS at bottom the paradox of iterability. Iterability requires
this way in commenting on the double meaning of the word ?espen- ongm to repeat itself originarily, to alter itself so as to have the
stich). This absence of a frontier between the two typ~s o~ v.IOlence, of origin, that is, to conserve itself. Right away there are police
the police legislate, not content to enforce a law that would have
this contamination between foundation and conservatIOn IS Ignoble,
it is, he says, the ignominy (das Schmachvolle) of the police. For today no force before the police. This iterability inscribes conservation
the ~ssential structure of foundation. This law or this general ne-
the police are no longer content to enforce the law, a.nd thus to con-
serve it; they invent it, they publish ordinances, they .mterve~e when- ~s ~ot.a modern phenomenon, it has an !!-."I!li!2ri worth, even if
ever the legal situation isn't clear to guarantee secunty. WhIch these IS nght to give examples that are irreducibly modern in their
Rigorously speaking, iterability precludes the ossibilitv
pure and great founders, initiators, l~wmakers ,("great" ,Poets, think-

ers or men of state, in the sense Heldegger wIll mean ~n 1935, fol-
~ivilisierten Staaten, "all pervasive ghostly presence in the life of civi-
lowing an analogous schema concerning the fatal sacnfice of these
hze~ states," p ..2~7). And stil!, this formless ungraspable figure of the
?ohce, e~en as It IS metonymlzed, spectralized, and even as it installs
founders). .
ItS ?auntmg p~esence everywhere, would if Benjamin had his way re-
I do not see ruin as a negative thing. l l First of all, it is clearly not a
mam a determmable figure proper to the civilized states. He claims to
thing. And then I would love to write, may~e with or follo,,:ing Ben-
jamin, maybe against Benjamin, a short treatIse on love of rums. What know wh~t he is sp~akingof when he speaks of the proper meaning
of the pohce and tnes to determine that phenomenon. It is hard to
else is there to love, anyway? One cannot love a monument, a work
know whether he's speaking of the police of the modern state or of
of architecture an institution as such except in an experience itself
precarious in i~s fragility: it hasn't always been there, it,will not al-
the state in general when he mentions the civilized state. I'm inclined
toward the first hypothesis for two reasons:
ways be there, it is finite. And for this very reason I love l~ as mortal,
through its birth and its death, through the ghost or the sIlhouette of 1. He sel.ects modern examples of violence, for example that of the
general stnke or the problem of the death penalty. Earlier on he
its ruin, of my own-which it already is or already prefi?ures. How
speaks not only of civilized states but of another "institution ot'the
can we love except in this finitude? Where else would the nght to love,
indeed the love of right, come from? (D'ou viendrait autrement le modern s~ate,'~ the police. It is the modern police, in politico-technical
modern SItuatIons that have led to produce the law that they are only
droit d'aimer. va ire l'amour du droit?) supposed to enforce.
Let us retdrn to the thing itself, to the ghost, for this text is a ghost
story. We can no more avoid ghost and ruin than we can elude the . 2. ~~le recognizing that the phantom body of the police, however
m~~sIve It. may be, always remains equal to itself, he admits that its
question of the rhetorical status of this textual event., To w~at ?gures
SpIrIt (GeIst), the spirit of the police, does less damage in absolute
does it turn for its exposition, for its internal explosiOn or ItS ,Implo-
monarchy than it does in modern democracies where its violence de-
sion? All the exemplary figures of the violence of law ar~ ~l,n,gular
gen~rat~s. Let us stay with this point a moment. I am not sure that
metonymies, namely, figures without limit, unfettered posslblhtles of
Benjamm worked out the rapprochement I'm attempting here between
transposition and figures without figures. Let us take the ex~mpl~ of
the words gespenstische, "spectral," and "Geist," spirit also in the
the police, this index of a phantom-like violence because. It mIxes
sense of the ghostly double.12 But the profound logic of this analogy
foundation with conservation and becomes all the more viOlent for
seems h~rdly contestable to me, even if Benjamin didn't recognize it.
The p~hce become hallucinatory and spectral because they haunt
this. Well, the police that thus capitalize on violence aren't Simply, the
police. They do not simply consist of policemen in uniform, occ~~lOn
eve~thmg; they are everywhere, even there where they are not in
theIr Fort-Dasein to which we can always appeal. Their presenc~ is
ally helmeted, armed and organized in a civil structure on a mlhtary
model to whom the right to strike is refused, and so forth. By defin~
present, any more than any presence is present, as Heidegger re-
tion, the police are present or represented, e~e:ywhere that there IS
us, but the presence of their spectral double knows no bound-
force of law. They are present, sometimes mVlslble but always eff~c
And it is in keeping with the logic of Zur Kritik der Gewalt to
tive, wherever there is preservation of the social order. The pohce
that anything having to do with the violence of droit-here the
aren't just the police (today more or less than ever), they ~re th~re, the
themselves-is not natural but spiritual. There is a spirit, both
faceless figure (figure sans figure) of a Dasein coextensl~e WIth the
the sense of specter and in the sense of the life that exalts itself
Dasein of the polis. Benjamin recognizes it in his way, but m a dO,uble
death, precisely, ,by m,eans .of the possibility of the death pen~
gesture that I don't think is delibe:at~ and i~ any case isn't thematlz~d.
above natural and bIologIcal hfe. The police bear witness to this
He never gives up trying to contam m a paIr of concepts and to bnng
I shall invoke a passage from the Ursprung der deutschen Trauer~
back down to distinctions the very thing that incessantly exceeds them
that s~eaks ~f Geist ,as the capacity to exercise dictatorship. I
and surpasses them. In this way he admits that the problem with the
my frIend TIm Bahtl for bringing this passage to my attention
police is that they are a faceless figure, a ~iolence without ,a form (ges-
one ought to read the whole chapter, which earlier on discusses
taltlos). As such, they are ungraspable m every way (ntrgends (~ss
apparition of specters [Geisterscheinungen, p. 273]): "Spirit
bare). In so-called civilized states the specter of its, ghost~y appantlOn
is all-pervasive (allverbreitete gespenstische Erschemung 1m Leben der ~so the epoch, ,,:~uld have it-manifests itself in power (weist
aus In Macht); SpIrlt IS the capacity to exercise dictatorship (Geist
ist das Vermogen, Diktatur auszuuben). ~his· capacity reqUIres a rig-

without this violence of means. The result: every juridical contract,
every ~echtsvertrag ("legal contract," p. 288) is founded on violence.
orous internal discipline just as much as It reqUlres the most unscru-
pulous external action (skrupello~este ~ktio~)" (p ..276). And further
There IS no contract that does not have violence as both an origin
(Urs~rung) and an outcome (Ausgang). Here a furtive and elliptical
on it is again a question of the evtl genlUS (bose ?el.st) of despots. .
allUSiOn by Benjamin is decisive, as is often the case. The violence that
Instead of being itself and being contained. ':Ithm democracy, thIS
spirit of the police, this police violence as Spirit degenerates th~re. It
founds or positions droit need not be immediately present in the con-
tract (nicht unmittelbar in ihm gegenwiirtig zu sein: "it need not be
bears witness in modern democracy to the greatest degeneracy Imag-
inable for violence (die denkbar grosste Entartung der ~ewalt ~e
directly present in it as lawmaking violence," p. 288). But without
zeugt "bears witness to the greatest conceivable degeneratiOn of v~o
being immediately presen.t, it is replaced (vertreten, "represented") by
the supplement of a SubstItute. And it is in this differance, in the move-
lence:" p. 287). Why? In absolute monarchy, legislativ~ and e:xecut~ve
powers are united. In it violence is therefore normal, m keepmg w~th
~ent that replaces presence (the immediate presence of violence iden-
tIfiable as ~u.ch in its ~r~its and its spirit), it is in this differantielle
its essence, its idea, its spirit. In democracy, on th~ other hand, ViO-
lence is no longer accorded to the spirit ~f th~ pO~I~e. Because of. the
representativity that ongmary violence is consigned to oblivion. This
supposed separation of powers, it is exerc~sed Illegltlmately, especIally
amnesic loss of consciousness does not happen by accident. It is the
very p~ssage from presence to representation. Such a passage forms
when instead of enforcing the law the pollce mak:~thd~~. ~er~ Ben-
jamin indicates the principle of an analysis ~f pollce reahty I~ md~s
the trajectory of decline, of institutional "degeneracy" their Verfall
("?e.cay"). ~enjamin had just spoken of a degeneracy (Entartung) of
trial democracies and their military-industnal complexes wIth ~Igh
computer technology. In absolute monarchy, pol~ce violence, te~n~le
ongmary vlOlence, for example, that of police violence in absolute
as it may be, proves to be what it is and ,:hat It .ou~ht to be m .ItS
m?narchy, :vhich is corrupted in modern democracies. Here is Benja-
~lln deplonng th~ Verfall of revolution in parliamentary spectacle:
spirit, while the police violence of democra~Ies demes Its proper pnn-
: W?en. the C?nSClOUSness of the latent presence of violence in a legal
ciple, making laws surreptitiously, clandestmely. The consequen~es or
mstItu.tlOn . dIsappears, the institution falls into decay" (p. 288)
implications are twofold: (1) democracy is a degeneracy of droit and
(schwmdet das BewufStsein von der latenten Anwesenheit der Gewalt
of the violence of droit; (2) there is not yet any democracy worthy of
in einem Rechtsinstitut, so verfiillt es). The first example chos~n is that
this name. Democracy remains to come: to engender. or to re~e.nerate.
?f the parliaments of the time. If they offer a deplorable spectacle, it
And so Benjamin's argument, which then. develops. mto a cntique of
IS. because these ~epresentative institutions forget the revolutionary
the parliamentarism of liberal democracy, IS revolutIOnary, eve~ marx-
VIOlence from whIch they are born. In Germany in particular, they
isant but in the two senses of the word "revolutionary," whIch also
have forgotten the abortive revolution of 1919. They have lost the
incl;des the sense "reactionary," that is, the sense of a return to the
sense of the founding violence of droit that is represented in them .
past of a purer origin. This equivocation. is typical enough to h.ave fed
("Ihnen fehlt der Sinn fur die rechtsetzende Gewalt, die in ihnen re-
many revolutionary discourses on the nght and the left, particularl!
priisentiert ist," "They lack the sense that a lawmaking violence is
between the two wars. A critique of "degeneracy" (Entar~ung). as cn-
tique of a parliamentarism powerless to co~t~ol the p.ohce viOlence
'represented by themselves," p ..288). The parliaments live in forgetful-
of the ViOlence from whIch they are born. This amnesic dene-
that substitutes itself for it, is very much a cntique of viOlence on. the
basis of a "philosophy of history": a ~utting into. archeo-tele?logical,
is not a psychological weakness, it is their statut and their
stnLcttlIe.From this point on, instead of coming to decisions commen-
indeed archeo-eschatological perspectIve that deCIphers .the hISto.ry. of
or. proportional to this violence and worthy (wurdig) of it,
droit as a decay (Verfall) since its origin. The analogy WIth S~h~lttlan
pra~Ice the hypocritical politics of compromise. The concept of
or Heideggerian schemas does not need to be spelled out: ThIS tnangle
.colnp:rornisle. the denegation of open violence, the recourse to dissi-
could be illustrated by a correspondence, I mean the e~lsto.lary c?rre-
spondence that linked these three t~inkers (~~hmittlBenJar~m, Heideg-
H!LUd'.c;U violence belong to the spirit of violence, to the "mentality of
(Mentalitiit der Gewalt) that goes so far as to accept coer-

ger/Schmitt). And it is still a questiOn of spmt and revolutiO~.
The basic question would be: what about liberal and parhamenta~ of. the ad~ersary to avoid the worst, at the same time saying to
democracy today? As means, all violence founds or prese~ves dro/~.
WIth the SIgh .of the parliamentarian that this certainly isn't ideal,
no doubt, thIS would have been better otherwise but that, pre-
Otherwise it would lose all value. There is no problematIc of drOit
cis ely, one couldn't do otherwise. Parliamentarism, then, is in violence also of the advent of n 'I h
and the renunciation of the ideal. It fails to resolve political conflicts
by non-violent speech, discussion, deliberation, in short by putting :~~~~:~e of language °C:~~~:::i~:s~~~:s~dce::t~i~s l~:~~:g~f ~~~
liberal democracy to work. In face of the "decay of parliaments" (der n as re-preSentatIOn or in a m 'f ' h
arises, or not yet from com " , ham estatlon t at no longer
Verfall der Parlamente), Benjamin finds the critique of the Bolshevists . . , ' mumcatIOn t rough sign f
mcatIOn in general that is f h s, rom commu-
and the trade-unionists both pertinent (treffende) overall and radically B ' " ' , rom t e means/end structure~
enJamIn Intends to prove th t a ' 1 .
~~~!:;t~s:~~~i~? ~~~~:ivate wo:ld :~:~~~oiSe;~I:~~~n:~~o~~~r~o:f
destructive (vernichtende) ..
Now we must introduce a distinction that once again brings to-
gether Benjamin and one Carl Schmitt and in any case gives a more (Unterredung, "conferen~;~,;ympat~ Jove of ~e,ace, trust. Dialogue
precise sense of what the historical configuration could have been in
which all these different modes of thinking were inscribed (the exor-
be the most profound exam' t S
~ec mque of CIvIl agreement, would
considered excluded from t6 e. ,ut by what token can violence be
bitant price Germany had to pay for defeat, the Weimar Republic, the Sphiire)? Benjamin's respon e pnv~te or p,r~per sphere (eigenthche
crisis and impotence of the new parliamentarism, the failure of paci- bility of this non-violen ,se may e surpnsIng to some. The possi-
fism, the aftermath of the October revolution, conflict between the Luge "lying" 289 ~e IS atteste? to by the fact that the lie (die
media and parliamentarism, new particulars of international law; and , ,p. ) IS not pumshed 'd '
"fraud") R 1 ' nor IS eceptIOn (Betrug
so forth). We just saw, in sum, that in its origin and its end, in its . oman aw and Old G 1 d'd '
consider a lie an offence i ,erman aw 1 not punish them. To
foundation and its conservation, le droit was inseparable from vio- dining vitality"). Modern slaa:~~n o~ d,e~a,de?ce (V,erfallsprozess, "de-
lence, immediate or mediate, present or represented. Does this exclude tion not for moral reasons but ~es aIt ~n ~tself, It co~demns decep-
all non-violence in the elimination of conflicts, as we might placidly might lead to on th " , ecause It ears the VIOlence that it
conclude? Not at all. Benjamin does not exclude the possibility of e VIctIms part They rna ' h
order of droit It is th h' " Y In return t rea ten the
non-violence. But the thought of non-violence must exceed the order , . , e same mec amsm as the one at work in the
of public droit. Union without violence (gewaltlose Einigung, "non- ,~vu'-"""J'UIl'tOhf the hnght ,to strike. It is a matter of limiting the worst
WI anot er VIOlence What B ' ,
of is anforder of n,on-violence that Withh:~~s~~:~e;~so:~:e ~r~a~ing
violent agreement," p. 289) is possible everywhere that the culture of
the heart (die Kultur des Herzens) gives men pure means with accord
so rom the nght to punish the lie- , r 0, rDtt-
(Ubereinkunft) in view. Does this mean we must stop at this opposi- certain public relations as in th not o~IY pnvat~ relat~ons but
tion between private and public to protect a domain of non-violence? speaks about wh' h ' 'k e genera proletanan stnke that
Things are far from that simple. Other conceptual divisions will-de- , IC IS a stn e that would not attempt to
a state and a new d 't ' re-
limit, in the sphere of politics itself, the relation of violence to non- I'n a m anner ana Iogousrot ; or agaIn certain diplomatic relations in
t' I'
violence. This would be, for example, in the tradition of Sorel or settle conflicts peacefully ~ ~nv~t~ re atIOns~ certain ambassa-
Marx, the distinction between the general political strike, violent since , in th' b ,~:Vlt out treatIes. Arbitration is
it wants to replace the state with another state (for example the one
that just flashed forth in Germany) and the general proletarian strike,
so beyond violence ("beyo d 11 I t
IS case ecause It IS situat d b d II
eyon a order of droit
violence" p 293) Wi n 'lla e~a systems, and therefore be-
that revolution that instead of strengthening the state aims at its ,. . e sh a see In a m h h'
~s ~ot :vithout affinity to pure violence.oment ow t IS non-
suppression, as it aims at the elimination of "sociologists, says Sorel,
men of the world so fond of social reforms, intellectuals who have enjamIn proposes an analogy that we should I'
<,m()mf~nt, 'lIb Inger over for
embraced the profession of thinking for the proletariat" ("sociolo- partlcu ar y ecause it brings in this en' ,
What would h 'f' Igmatlc concept of
gists, elegant amateurs of social reforms or intellectuals who have' Gewalt, "violen~~~~~~s:dv~ol~nce"Iinked to fate (~chi~ksalsmi:is-
made it their profession to think for the proletariat," p. 292). ~rec;httrrtp) f d' l ' y ate, p. 293) and USIng Just means
Another distinction seems even more radical and closer to what And ' oun Itse f In an insoluble conflict with just (gerechten)
h
concerns the critique of violence as a means. It opposes the order of
means and representation, precisely, to the order of manifestation.
tha~~:;~rdi:;r~s:h:~d:ew~:tdt~e e:~~~~; a~~~7:~d~nd a of
Once again it is very much a question of the violence of language, it =ar;:? N~Ither a justified nor an unjustified means, ::d:~
u no onger even be a means but would enter into a
SO/The "Mystical Foundation of Authority"
whole other relation with the pair means/end. Then we would be deal- means, incite babbling (Geschwiitz) Th '
ing with a wholly other violence that would no longer allow itself to after the creation arises from this bab'blin e i~estIOn of good and evil
g
be determined in the space opened up by the opposition means/end. not there to provide knowled e f d · e t~ee of knowledge was
The question is all the more grave in that it exceeds or displaces the zeichen" th ' b k ' g, 0 goo and evIl but as the "Wahr-
, e SIgn eto emng Jud (G' h
initial problematic that Benjamin had up to this point constructed on questions . "ThI's ex t raor d'mary Iro
,gment "B enc' , t) borne by he who
the subject of violence and droit and that was entirely governed by the sign by which the mythical 0 " ~Yd ,e~Jamm concludes, "is the
concept of means. Here it will be noticed that there are cases in which, zeichen des mythischen Ursp ngm dO Rro1t IS recognized" (das Kenn-
posed in terms of means/ends, the problem of droit remains undecid- Beyond this simple analo rungs B "
es echtes Bd 11 1
' " p.
154)
.
able. This ultimate undecidability which is that of all problems of finality, a justice of ends th~ , enJa~m her~ wants to conceive of a
droit (Unentscheidbarkeit aller Rechtsprobleme, "ultimate insolubil- droit, in any case to what' :s no onger, tIed to the possibility of
ity of all legal problems," p. 293) is the insight of a singular and dis- The universalization of dr~:t ~s~:;: concelVe,d ,~f as, u?iversalizable.
couraging experience. Where is one to go after recognizing this in- inscribed in the concept of 'ustice (~? pOS~Iblh,ty, It IS ,analytically
eluctable undecidability? what is not understood iS h J , ,erechtlgkelt). But m this case
Such a question opens, first, upon another dimension of language, God himself that is wI'th tthat thIS uhmvders~lity is in contradiction with
on an au-dela beyond mediation and so beyond language as sign in , , e one w 0 eCld th 1 "
and the justice of ends over and ab es e egmmacy of means
the sense of mediation, as a means with an end in view. It seems at violence, This sudden referenc t ~v~re~son and even above destinal
beyond a sort of Aufkliirung oef 1 ~ a "~~e reason and universality,
0
first that there is no way out and so no hope. But at the impasse, this
despair (Aussichtslosigkeit, "insolubility," "hopelessness") summons
up decisions of thought that concern nothing less than the origin of
to the irreducible singularity
th h
tw, Ihs n?t I~g other than a reference
0 eac SItuatIOn And the d '
oug t, as necessary as it is perilous f h ' au aclOUS
language in its relation to the truth, destinal violence (schicksalhafte '.. justice without droit (this is ,0 fW at ,I shall here call a Sort
Gewalt, "fate-imposed violence") that puts itself above reason, then, ". 1 not one 0 Benjamin's ex ' )'
. as va id for the uniqueness of th ' d' 'd 1 f presslOns IS
above this violence itself, God: another, a wholly other "mystical 'the langua~e, in short, for history, e m IVI ua as or the people and
foundation of authority." It is not, to be sure, Montaigne's or Pascal's,
To eX?lam this "nonmediate function of violenc " ,
but we shouldn't trust too much in this distance. That is what the mtttelbare Funktion der Gewalt) B ' , e, (p, 294) (Eme
Aussichtslosigkeit of droit in some way opens up on, that is where the .• ' of everyday language as if it w;re enJ~mm agam takes the e~-
impasse of droit leads. to me, we have here the tr o? y an analogy. In fact, It
There would be an analogy between "the undecidability (Unentsch-
eidbarkeit) of all the problems of droit" and what happens in nascent Ut:(;ISIIOnth'!~ i~~~h~h::;:r~~:c~:l;t~e;~~:~~~ ~;~r:h~/~r~l;~~; ~:
language (in werdenden Sprachen) in which it is impossible to make a '. tion that has nothin t a~ger, ,an example of an immediate
clear, convincing, determinant decision (Entscheidung) between true . explosion of violence in: 0 ? WIth any means/end structure?
and false, correct and incorrect (richtig/falsch, "right/wrong"). This is end; it has no object ~ther ~~:~ I:onot a means that l?oks toward
only an analogy proposed in passing. But it could be developed on the the responsibility for this concept :~~w ~nd, shohw ~tse1f. Let us
basis of other Benjamin texts on language, notably "The Task of the , d' enJamm: t em some wa
Imme late and unca1cul t d ,£, y
Translator" (1923) and especially the famous essay of 1916, five years matters to h i ' , , a e mam estatlOn of anger.
before, "On Language in General and Human Language." Both put 1 k' m IS a mamfestatIon of violence that would not b .
into question the notion that the essence of language is originally com- . ~o mg toward an end. Such would be myth' '1 e
UCl!Hlt::SI:ann,n of the gods. IC VIO ence as
municative, that is to say semiological, informative, representative, . begins the last sequen h "
conventional, hence mediatory. It is not a means with an end in and the most profoundc~~ \:' most emgmatlc, the most fasci-
view-a thing or signified content-to which it would have to ade- time, I cannot claim to do it' I~ text. ~or lack of time but not
quate itself correctly. This critique of the sign was political then as stressing on the one hand t~eU~~~~~b: WI~ ?ave t~ ~ontent myself
well: the conception of language as means and as sign would be the text, on the other hand th e et ~co-PO,h,tlcal ambiguity
"bourgeois." The 1916 text defined original sin as that fall into a lan- its signature what finally: e e~~mplar~ mstabIllty of its status
guage of mediate communication where words, having become
(ce coeu~ ou c~ coura~~O~r:I thf:~~~ ~::~~~~~h:~e~:~:t ~~
living (itber alles Leben um des Lebendigen willen: "Mythical violence

, t e no j'ustice no responsibility except in exposing oneself to all
is bloody power over mere life for its own sake, divine violence pure
JUS ess , d '' d nd goo d '
consClence. , '
risks, beyon certItu l~ a the manifestation of divine vi?l~nce m 1tS power over all life for the sake of the living," p. 297). In other words,
In the Greek wor, , h than enforcing an eX1stmg one ?y the mythological violence of droit is satisfied in itself by sacrificing the
mythic form founds a ~rOlt rat er 'h ents It is not a distribut1ve living, while divine violence sacrifices life to save the living, in favor
" satlOnS an d pums m . 1 f of the living. In both cases there is sacrifice, but in the case where
distnbutmg compen " o k e s the legendary examp es 0
'b '
or retn ut1ve JUS 1" ' t'ce and Benjamm hev As it is a matter of oun d'mg
f blood is exacted, the living is not respected. Whence Benjamin's sin-
Niobe, Apollo an~ Artem1s, Pr~~et e~~. Niobe comes from fate; and gular conclusion, and again I leave to him responsibility for this inter-
S
a new droit, the vlOlence th~t a d up b' ous Izweideutig) since it is pretation, particularly for this interpretation of Judaism: "The first
1 be uncertam an am 19U \ 'd (the mythological violence of droit) demands ((ordert) sacrifice, the
this fate can on y t riar superior or transcen ant
not preceded or ~egul~ted by, any a~ :op:r1y destructive" (eigentlich second (divine violence) accepts it, assumes it (nimmt sie an)." In any
droit. This foundmg vlOlence ~s ~~t ,P for example it respects the case, this divine violence, which will be att.ested to not only by religion
zerstorend, "actually destruc~lv~ ,)' smc~loody death ~o Niobe's chil- but also in present life or in manifestations of the sacred, may anni-
mother's life in the ,moment 1t nniY~e~ as we shall see, is here a dis- hilate goods, life, droit, the foundation of droit, and so on, but it never
dren, But this alluslOn, to b~o~d sPh 'thical and violent foundation mounts an attack to destroy the soul of the living (die Seele des Le-
" ' 'd for 1dentlfymg t e my " ' bendigen). Consequently, we have no right to conclude that divine
cnmmatmg m ex d d" ishes it from the d1vme VlO-
" h G ek world an 1stmgu b' ' violence leaves the field open for all human crimes. "Thou shalt not
of drOIt m t e re , ' f f ltiple examples of this am 19mty
lence of Judaism. Ben]amm 0 ers mU t four times) and even of the kill" remains an absolute imperative once the principle of the most
l
(Zweideutigkeit" th~ word r~turn:~:a~as ositioning of droit!3 which is ,nporrl1rr'",,, divine violence commands the respect of the living being,
"demonic" amb1gmty of th1S my

I ' 'Ie a power \ ac,
lM ht) a force a position of
'
droit, beyond judgment. It is not a "criterion of judgment"
in its £undamenta pnnc1 P h' If ggests with Benjamin's appar- a "guideline for the actions of persons or communities who have
' an d s, 0 as Sore 1
auth onty , , 1mse£ k' s u£,the great or power f u i: t
a wrestle with it in solitude and in exceptional cases, to take on them-
'" der er
1r
ent approval here, a prlVlleg ~ 'I mgs 0 den Anfiingen alles Recht
e
the origin of all droit is a dpnvC ege In kurz der Miichtigen: "in the
rossen ,
yes the responsibility of ignoring it. That for Benjamin is the essence
Judaism which forbids all murder, except in the singular cases of
"Vor"recht d er K onzge a , ' f the kings or the nobles-m ~~M",,·.u.a self-defense, and which sacralizes life to the point that cer-
" 11' ht was the prerogat1ve 0 , thinkers extend this sacralization beyond man, to include animal
begmmng a r~g " 296) At this originary and myth1c moment,
short of the m1ghty, ,p', ' " chastisement or penalty, only vegetable. But here we should sharpen the point of what Benjamin
there is still no distnbut1ve jUst1ce, no 'b' ") by the sacrality of man, life or rather human Dasein. He stands
"h b dly translated as "retn utlOn . f
expiation (Su ne, a k h0 5 Benjamin opposes feature or vigorously against all sacralization of life (or itself, natural life, the
To this violence of the Gree myt 11 , , ts of view. he says, it is its fact of life. Commenting at length on the words of Kurt Hiller,
h '1 of God From a POm , , ....VJ.UUll:: to which "higher even than the happiness and the justice of
feature t e VlO ence d'" d 't 't destroys it· instead of settmg
opposite. Instead 0,£ fo~n m?h'lr~/, :hem' instead' of leading to error stands existence itself" (p. 298), Benjamin judges the prop-
limits and boundanes, 1t anm 1, a es , 'd of threatening it strikes; that simple Dasein should be higher than just Dasein (als ge-
" 't ses to exp1ate' mstea ' bl d
and exp1at1on, 1 , c~u , 1 ' int instead of killing with 00, Dasein) to be false and ignoble, if simple Dasein is taken to
and above all, th1S 1S the ~ssentIabl pOd h' d Blood makes all the differ- the simple fact of living. And while noting that these terms
'h'l WIthout 00 s e .
and "life" remain very ambiguous, he judges the same prop-
it kills and anm 1 ates f h' h ht of blood is as troubling,
' etation 0 t 1S t oug , (
ence. Th e mterpr , B ' ' as it is in Rosenzwe1g espe- however ambiguous it may remain, in the opposite way, as
spite certain dissonances, m I enlja~m") Blood is the symbol of ' of a powerful truth (gewaltige Wahrheit) if it means that man's
, h' k f the "fina so utIon . d " would be still more terrible than man's not-yet-being just,
cially 1f we t m, 0 d flow. the mythological violence of rOlt
he says. In makmg bloo ( :h elbst willen) against life pure the not yet attained condition of the just man, purely and simply.
, d' 't own favor um I rer s , h' words, what makes for the worth of man, of his Dasein and i
exerClse m1 s bl d as it remains precisely W1t m
simple which it causes to lee ,eLvebn ) In contrast purely divine is that he contains the potential, the possibility of justice, the i.
1 life (das b osse e en . 'f f V'u\.; (avenir) of justice, the yet-to-come of his hpino-;nct- ~~ I-.;~
or der 0 f natur~ 'd 11 rf but to the profit or in avor 0 ·LV·· ...
daic) violence 1S exerClse on a l e

having-to-be just. What is sacred in his life is not his life but the justice
of his life. Even if beasts and plants wer~ sac~e.d, they w.oul.d not be .so lectic of up and down" (ein dialektisches Auf und Ab, "dialectical
sim ly for their life, says Benjamin. This cntlque of vltalI.s~ or blO- rising and falling") in the founding or conserving violence of droit
logi~m if it also resembles one by a certain Heidegger and If It .recalls, constitutes an oscillation in which the violence that conserves must
as I h~ve noted elsewhere, a certain Hegel, .here ~ro~ee~s lIke th~ constantly give itself up to the repression of hostile counter-violences
awakening of a Judaic tradition. Because of this ambigUIty. m the con (Unterdruckung der feindlichen Gegengewalten). But this repres-
cepts of life and Dasein, Benjamin is both draw? to and retIce~t before sion-and droit, the juridical institution, is essentially repressive from
the dogma that affirms the sacred character of hf~, as ?atural hfe, p~r~ this point of view-never ceases to weaken the founding violence that
and simple. The origin of this dogma .deserves mqUiry, notes B.enJa_ it represents. And so it destroys itself in the course of this cycle. For
mm,. who is ready to see in it the relatively d modern and nostalgic re here Benjamin to some extent recognizes this law of iterability that
sponse of the West to the loss of the sacre . . " insures that the founding violence is constantly represented in a con-
Which is the ultimate and most provocative paradox of t~IS cntlq~e servative violence that always repeats the tradition of its origin and
. Ience.~ The one that offers the most to think
o f VlO " about?
. It IS hthat thiSd that ultimately keeps nothing but a foundation destined from the start
critique presents itself as the only "philosophy of ~Istory (t e wor to be repeated, conserved, reinstituted. Benjamin says that founding
"h'l hy" remaining in unforgettable quotation marks). that violence is "represented" (reprasentiert) in conservative violence.
p I osop 1 " .. 1" b the
makes possible an attitude that is not mere y" c~I~lca" u~, I~ To think at this point that we have cast light and correctly inter-
more critical and diacritical sense of the word crltIque, ~rmemd an ?reted t?e meaning, the vouloir-dire of Benjamin's text, by opposing
attitude that permits us to choose (krinein), and so to de~lde an to III a deCidable way the decidability of divine, revolutionary, historical,
cut decisively in history and on the subject of history. It. IS the only anti-state, anti-juridical violence on one side and on the other the un-
one, Benjamin says, that permits us, in respe~t to pres~nt time, to,;a~e decidability of the mythic violence of state droit, would still be to
a decisive position (scheidende und entschetdende Emstellu~g, .d.ls- decide too quickly and not to understand the power of this text. For
criminating and decisive approach," pp. 299-300). All undecldabll.lty in its last lines a new act of the drama is played, or a coup de theatre
(Unentscheidbarkeit) is situated, blocked in, accumulated. on the s~de that I couldn't swear was not premeditated from the moment the cur-
of droit of mythological violence, that is to say the vlOle?ce ~ .at tain went up. What does Benjamin in fact say? First he speaks in the
founds ~nd conserves droit. But on the other hand all decld~blhty conditional about revolutionary violence (l'evolutionare Gewalt); "if,"
stands on the side of the divine violence that destroys Ie d!"ott,. :ve beyond droit, violence sees its status insured as pure and immediate
could even venture to say deconstructs it. To say that all decldablhty violence, then this will prove that revolutionary violence is possible.
is found on the side of the divine violence that destroys or decon- Then we would know, but this is a conditional clause, that it is this
structs Ie droit is to say at least two things;... . revolutionary violence whose name is the purest manifestation of vio-
1. That history is on the side of this dlvme vI~lence, and hI~t?ry lence among men. But Why is this statement in the conditional? Is it
recisely in opposition to myth. It is indeed for t.hls :eason tha~ It s a Orily provisional and contingent? Not at all. For the decision (Entsch-
pmatter 0 fa" p hilosophy" of history and that eidung) on this subject, the determinant decision, the one that permits
. BenJamm
. h Z'appeals
I "In fact
w
to a "new historical era" (ein neues geschtchtltc es etta ter, a ne. us to know or to recognize such a pure and revolutionary violence as
. 1 epoc, h" p . 300) that should follow the end such, is a decision not accessible to man. Here we must deal with a
h·Istonca . fof the fmythiC
d 't
reign the interruption of the magic circle of the mythiC orm~ 0 rOI , other undecidability, and I prefer to cite Benjamin's sentence in
. the abolition of the Staatsgewalt, of the violenc~ ?r authonty of the ~~.~"~u.· "But it is neither equally possible nor equally urgent for man
state. This new historical era would be a new polItICal ~ra on the con-. decide when pure violence was effected in a determined case."
dition that politics not be tied to state control, as Schmitt for example. t gleich moglich, noch auch gleich dringend ist aber fur Men-
would have it. .. . I . die Entscheidung, wann reine Gewalt in einem bestimmten Faile
2. If all decidability is concentrated on the side of dl~me VIO e?ce m. war, "Less possible and also less urgent for humankind, how-
the Judaic tradition, this would come to c~nfir~ and give meam~g is to decide when unalloyed violence has been realized in partic-
cases," p. 300).
the spectacle offered by the history of droIt whlc~ d~constructs" ..•
and is paralyzed in undecidability, since what BenJamm calls the dla. This results from the fact that divine violence, which is the most
the most historic, the most revolutionary, the most decidahlp nr
, , 1 nd itself to any h"uman determination, to
the most decldmg does not1 :, t' ty" on our part It is never known is a violence that will have "bastardized" (bastardierte) the "eternal
k 1 d or decidab e cer am , ,
any' nowe
If" ge 1 ' , "ff
h " but on y m Its e e l ' cts" and its effects are "mcom- forms of pure divine violence." Myth has bastardized divine violence
in Itse
bl ," as sucdo, not len d t h
they emse isve to any conceptual genera 1 d lza- with droit (mit dem Rec!?t). Misalliance, impure genealogy: not a mix-
para e" ' ( G /sh 't) or determinant know e ge ex- llire of bloods but bastardy which at its root will have created a droit
tion, There IS no certamty, ~Wlt et that is of droit, that is, of the that makes blood flow and exacts blood as payment.
'h 1m of mythIc VIO ence" , 1
cept m t e rea lk g b t "For only mythical VIO ence, And then, as soon as he has taken responsibility for this interpre-
undecidable we have been, tablm a o~ 'with certainty unless it be in tation of the Greek and the Jew, Benjamin signs, He speaks in an eval-
d' , ill be recogmza e as suc ,
not Ivme, w "300) To be schematic, there are
incomparable effects . .. G(P' I ' one side decision (just, hIs-
n: o uative, prescriptive, non-constative manner, as we do each time we
' 1 peting ewa ten: o n , b sign. Two energetic sentences proclaim what must be the watchwords,
VI0 ences, two com , . bond droit and the state, ut what one must do, what one must reject, the evil or perversity of what
'1 1" 1 and so on) JustIce ey d
tonca , po mca , , h th decidable knowledge an must be rejected (Verwerflich). "But one must reject (Verwer{lich aber)
without decidable knowledge; on ~l e 0 m:~~s that of the undecidable, all mythical violence, the violence that founds droit, which we may
certainty in a realm that structur~ y re 'de the decision without de- call governing (schaltende) violence, One must also reject (Verwerflich
of the mythic droit of the sthate. h onetaSl'~ty of the undecidable but
n
'bl ' t on the ot er t e cer 'd bl auch) the violence that conserves droit, the governed violence (die ver-
Clda e certam
d " y, I y case ' m one for m or another, the undecl a e waltete Gewalt) in the service of the governing." (The English trans-
without eClSlOn. nan .' 1 d't' of knowledge or action. lation is, as it often is, insipid: "But all mythical, lawmaking violence,
is on each side, and is the VIO ent con ,I lOn,
which we may call executive, is pernicious. Pernicious, too, is the law-
But kno:vledge an actlO~a~s in the singular, if there is one and only
d ' re always dIssocIated,
I preserving, administrative violence that serves it," p. 300).
QuestIOns: W~at o,n~ rmer or the latter? Something else en- Then there are the last words, the last sentence. Like the shophar at
one, deconstruc~lOn, IS It th~ ;oIf e trust the Benjaminian schema, is night or on the brink of a prayer one no longer hears or does not yet
tirely or someth~ng el~e agam, n ~he undecidable more Jewish (or hear. Not only does it sign, this ultimate address, and very close to the
the decons~ru,ctlve dls~ourse G~eek;l More religious, more mythic or first name of Benjamin, Walter. It also names the signature, the sign
Judaeo-Chnstlan-Islamlc) or , t' that take this form, and the seal, it names the name and what calls itself "die waltende."
more philosophical? If I do not answer queshlOnhs, s "Deconstruc-
But who signs? It is God, the Wholly Other, as always, it is the divine
it is not on y ecause a~
1 b I not sure that suc a t mg a
, 'ble It is also because I think violence that always will have preceded but also will have given all the
tion," in the sin~ular~ eXIsts or IS th~SSI re~ent themselves in their ir- first names: "Die gottliche Gewalt, welche Insignium und Siegel, nie-
that deconstruc~lve dlsc?~rses ~s an~;: ure, contaminating, negoti- Mittel heiliger Vollstreckung ist, mag die waltende heifSen": "Di-
reducible plurahty ~artlClpate l~ all th~se filiations-let's call them vine violence, which is the sign and seal but never the means of sacred
ated, bastard and vlOle~t way f d " and the undecidable. And execution, may be called sovereign violence (die waltende heissen)." 15
Judaeo-Greek tOd s~ve ~lm~~~at :~~~:t be exactly what Benjamin
Jew an t e ~e~n~ll for what remains to com~ in decon-
Jacques Derrida
then" the
had m mmd f?r us. An h.Y else runs through its vems,perhaps Post-scriptum
struction, I thmk that s~mlet ;~ t blood or rather something en-
without filiation, an entlre y 1 eren .
This strange text is dated. Every signature is dated, even and per-
tirely different f~om bl,ood.
14
, t Benj am in I nevertheless leave all the more so if it slips in among several names of God and
And so in saymg adteu ?r a~-rev;t~e:st if he ca~. It is always neces- signs by pretending to let God himself sign. If this text is dated
him the last word. I l,et hlmdsl,g~, I s the other that signs last. In signed (Walter, 1921), we have only a limited right to convoke it
sary that the other SIgn an It IS a way
bear witness either to Nazism in general (which had not yet devel-
other words, first. "b f .. even uses the word as such), or to the new forms assumed there by the racism and
In his last lines, Benjamm, Jusdt fie,~re slgfn:~;'myth and so of the ~uuu,.u"...,'U"U that are inseparable from it, or even less to the final
d " Th . short is the e mtlOn 0 , ,
"bastar. violence
founding , Myth'lC drOt,
at mof drott, 't we could say juridical fictlOn, : not only because the project and the deployment of the final
came later and even after the death of Benjamin, but because
, d t' of Authority"
58 I The "MystIcal Fou11 a 1011
, 'the finai solution is something that 2. The totalitarian radicalization of a logic of the state (and our text
within the history Itself ~f Nl aZlsm tcome and inscribed in the very is indeed a condemnation of the state, even of the revolution that re-
, h 'd r an me ucta bl e ou , h places a state by another state, which is also valid for other totalitar-
some mIg t consl e , h h' h s a proper identity t at can
N ' If suc a t mg a h ianisms-and already we see prefigured the question of the Histori-
premises 0 f aZlsm, hile others-whether or not t ey a~e
sustain this sort of utt~ran~~i:k that the project of a final solutIO? IS kerstreit) ;
Nazis or Germans-mIght '1 'thin the history of NaZIsm 3. The radical but also fatal corruption of parliamentary and rep-
, d d ething entIre y new WI F 11 f resentative democracy through a modern police that is inseparable
an event, m ee s?m bsolutely specific analysis. or a 0
and that as such It deserves ahn a h 'ht or we would have only a from it, that becomes the true legislative power and whose phantom
ld not ave t e ng ld h commands the totality of the political space. From this point of view,
these reasons, we wou I h t Walter Benjamin wou ave
limited right to ask ours~ ves ~,tt has one and only one) of both the final solution is both a historico-political decision by the state and
thought, in the logic of th~s text 1 1 a decision by the police, the civil and the military police, without any-
Nazism and the final solutIOn. 'lId' t that and I will do it by going one ever being able to discern the one from the other and to assign the
, t 'n way I WI 0 IUS, , true responsibilities to anyone decision whatsoever.
And yet macer al , lf f 'ts event and ItS structure,
beyond my interest for this text lt~e f or lnfiguration of Jewish and 4. A radicalization and total extension of the mythical, of mythical
for that which it allows us to r~a ,0 a t~azism as one says, of all violence, both in its sacrificial founding moment and its most conserv-
German thinking right before t e r~s~ 0 that or~anize such a config- ative moment. And this mythological dimension, that is at once Greek
the shared portions and all the p~rt~tl,ons the radical reversals of pro and aestheticizing (like fascism, Nazism is mythological, Grecoid, and
tiginous proxlmltleS, ' h t if it corresponds to an aestheticization of the political, it is in an aes-
uration, 0 f t h ever , mon premises. Presummg, t a
1r
into con on the basis of sometlm~~ com able which 1 doubt. In truth, thetics of representation), this mythological dimension also responds
is that all these problems are re~ y,se el/ thought of Nazism and to a certain violence of state law, of its police and its technics, of right
ms
I 'will,
not ask myself what Be~lamm lh e other means of doing so,
' , 11 the more so smce we av , 'h' 1£
dissociated from justice, as the conceptual generality propi-
antIsemItiSm, a , ill I ask what Walter Benlamm lmse tious to the mass structure in opposition to the consideration of sin-
other texts by hIm. Nor w 1 I tion and what judgments, what and uniqueness. How can one otherwise explain the institu-
would have thought of the fina so u d I will seek something else, in tional, even bureaucratic form, the simulacra of legalization, of
interpretations he would have pro~ose. enigmatic and over deter- juridicism, the respect for expertise and for hierarchies, in short, the
a modest and preliminary wa~. owe~erht be however mobile and judicial and state organization that marked the techno-
1 '1 trix of thIS text m I g , Th' Industrial and scientific deployment of the "final solution"? Here a
mined the oglca rna 'bl" 't has its own coherence. IS
convertible, however reverSl be: ~f l~~~er texts by Benja~in, both ear- certain mythology of right was unleashed against a justice which Ben-
coherence also marks a num , t of certain insIstent elements , believed ought to be kept radically distinct from right, from
lier and later ones. It is by ta khmg Iacc~lulnt y out several hypotheses in atural as well as historic right, from the violence of its foundation as
in thIS 'h co erent con t'nuity1
t at WI'bl r tterances by BenJamm , ' b ut as from that of its conservation. And Nazism was a conservative
,tut not some POSSI e u h' h irevnl[lticm of right.
order to reconstl e bl' d interpretive space in w lC
t of the pro ematlC an d .' . But, on the other hand and for these very reasons, because Nazism
the larger aspec s " ht have been inscribe .
his discourse on the final so~~xo~c%~tlY have taken the final solution logically to the final solution as to its own limit and because the
On the one hand, he wo P f 1 ' of Nazism that, to take up mvthc)lnl:r,'cal violence of right is its veritable system, one can only
onsequence 0 a OglC that is, also remember the uniqueness of the final solution from
to be the extreme c ld have corresponded to:
'h pts from our text, wou 1 f other than this space of the mythological violence of right. To
agam t e con,ce, , f 'I linked to the fall into the ~ngu~ge 0
1. The radIcalIzatIon 0 e~l ' f ' ( nd from thIS pomt of the measure of this event and of what links it to destiny, one
, ' tatIOn m ormatIOn a ,
communlcatIOn, represen h t ervasive figure of media VlO- have to leave the order of right, of myth, of representation (of
. view, Nazism has indeed be~n t, e m~sth~ modern techniques of coro- olitical representation with its tribunals of historian-judges,
lence and of political eXP,lodltatIO,nlol uage and of the language of also of aesthetic representation). Because what Nazism, as the fi-
, ' 1 u age of m ustna ang 1 ' f h achievement of the logic of mythological violence, would have at-
mUnlCatlve ang , , 'fi' hich is linked the OglC 0 t e
, d t of scientific object! cation to w, ' It:llJIULC:U to do is to exclude thf' nthpr m;"~~nn ~- 3 •
m us ry~ l' nd of formalizing regIstratiOn);
conventIOna SIgn a
of the other order, of a divine violence whose justice is irreducible to whether it be that of naturalla' ,
right, of a violence heterogeneous to the order both of right (be it that . o~ the Aufkldrung). Benjamin ~ol~~he ~Istotelian ~tyle or the style
of human rights or of the order of representation) and of myth. In WIthout pertinence in any cas 'h per aps have judged vain and
th ' e WIt out p ,
other words, one cannot think the uniqueness of an event like the final , e event, any historical or ae h ' , er:men~e commensurable to
solution, as extreme point of mythic and representational violence, tlOn that, like all objectifi (st etIC objectIficatIOn of the final solu
within its own system. One must try to think it beginning with its the representable and eve~a~~~~, ~ould s,rill belong to the order of
other, that is to say, starting from what it tried to exclude and to ~nd decidable judgment. Recall w~atetermInable, ?f the determinant
destroy, to exterminate radically, from that which haunted it at once In ,the order of the bad violence of ri we we:-e saYIng a moment ago:
evIl a~o~e from a certain undecidab~7:' t7 IS the mythological order,
from without and within. One must try to think it starting from the at
possibility of singularity, the singularity of the signature and of the not dIstmguish betWeen fo d' 'IY' rom the fact that one could
be un Ing VIO ence and '
name, because what the order of representation tried to exterminate cause corruption was diale _( 1 ' ,conservmg violence
was not only human lives by the millions, natural lives, but also a even as theoretical judgment C ~ca and dIalectically inevitable there'
demand for justice; and also names: and first of all the possibility of '. determinant there On th an representation were determinable or'
h' . e contrary: as
giving, inscribing, calling and recalling the name. Not only because •. IStOry begins-and the violence of di:,oon, as .one leaves this order,
there was a destruction or project of destruction of the name and of ; mans cannot measure jud ments ,~ne JustIce-but here we hu-
the very memory of the name, of the name as memory, but also be- ~retations. This also mea~s tha: ~~I~h IS to sa~ also decidable inter-
cause the system of mythical violence (objectivist, representational, hon, as of everything that c ' mhterpretatlO n of the final solu-
communicational, etc.) went all the way to its limit, in a demonic the tw d onstItutes t e set and th d 1" '
o or ers (the mythological and the d" , e, e ImItation of
fashion, on the two sides of the limit: at the same time, it kept the of man. No anthropology: no h ,IVIne) IS not m the measure
archive of its destruction, produced simulacra of justificatory argu- . h ,umamsm no di f
even on uman rights b : scourse 0 man on
ments, with a terrifying legal, bureaucratic, statist objectivity and par- . between the mythical and ;h~a~iv~:eroportIOn~te, to eith~r the rupture
adoxically produced a system in which its logic, the logic of objectiv- . final solution Such a pro' ' or to a hmlt expenence such as
t
ity made possible the invalidation and therefore the effacement of other of mythic violence jtehce atthtempts quite simply to annihilate
, , , 0 er of rep ,
testimony and of responsibilities, the neutralization of the singularity JustIce and that which b ' resentatlOn: destiny: di-
can ear WItness to 't' h '
of the final solution; in short, it produced the possibility of the histo- as h e is the only being h h' I , In ot er words man
riographic perversion that has been able to give rise both to the logic h , w 0, not aVIng rec' d h'
.. as receIved from G d h elve IS name from
o t e pOwer and th "
of revisionism (to be brief, let us say of the Faurisson type) as well as a name to his OWn kind d ' e mISSIon to name to
t an to gIve a nam t h' ,
a, positivist, comparatist, or relativist objectivism (like the one .• 0 represent, it is not to com ' b ~ 0 t mgs. To name is
linked to the Historikerstreit) according to which the existence of , . mumcate y SIgns th ' b
. In VIew of an end etc I h ' at IS, y means
, . n ot er words th I' f'
analogous totalitarian model and of earlier exterminations (the .. wou1d belong to that te 'bl d ',e me 0 thIS inter-
lag) explains the final solution, even "normalizes" it as an act of Au(kldrung that Benjamin h~~ a~r:~d crushmg cond~mnation of
a classic state response in time of war against the Jews of the -~,.. ~'"'-U by Schol em in 1963 h y ,formulated In a text of
who, speaking through the mouth of Weizman in September, onormg Adorno on his 60th
would have, in sum, like a quasi-state, declared war on the ... does not mean that one must sim 1
Reich. . the language of comm " p y renounce Enlightenment
umcatIOn or of repr "
From this point of view, Benjamin would perhaps have judged .wUF.U,~~t: of expression. In h' M ' eS~ntatIOn m favor of
and without pertinence-in any case without a pertinence '-VJlUU"""~ IS oscow Dlary 1926
. that the polarity between th m -27, Benja-
surable to the event, any juridical trial of Nazism and of its res;ponSI' command cannot be maint' d edtwo languages and all that
.bilities, any judgmental apparatus, any historiography still hOlmolge that" aIne an deployed'
. compromise" is necessary , 'b m a pure state
. neous with the space in which Nazism developed up to and remains a compromise between ;: I~evlta Ie between them. Ye;
the final solution, any interpretation drawing on philosophical, heterogeneous dimensions It' 0 mcommensurable and radi-
sociological, psychological or psychoanalytical concepts, and could draw here. the fatal . IS Pferhaps one of the lessons that
. . nature 0 the c '
cially juridical concepts (in particular those of the philosophy of Ige:ne()US orders, which is a com ' ompromIse between het-
promIse, moreover, in the n~mp nt
the justice that would command one to obey at the same time the law da y- an d'f 1 we can do so then we must-is that we must think k
of representations (Aufklarung, reason, objectification, comparison,
explication, the taking into account of multiplicity and therefore the :rese~~ f~r o~.selves, formalize, judge the possible compli~ityn~~
serialization of the unique) and the law that transcends representation e~ a t .ese Iscourses and the worst (here the final solution) In
and withholds the unique, all uniqueness, from its reinscription in an (y v~~w, ~IS defines a task and a responsibility the theme of which
order of generality or of comparison. ,res, . e ~ eme) I have not been able to read in either Benjaminian
What I find, in conclusion, the most redoubtable, indeed (perhaps, £destru~tlOn" or Heideggerian "Destruktion." It is the thought of dif-
erence etween these destructions on the one hand and a ·d
almost) intolerable in this text, even beyond the affinities it maintains ti ffi . econstruc-
with the worst (the critique of Aufklarung, the theory of the fall and . ve a .rma~lOn on the other that has guided me tonight in this read-
Ing. It IS thIS thought that the memory of the final I t'
of originary authenticity, the polarity between originary language and me to dictate. so u IOn seems to
fallen language, the critique of representation and of parliamentary
democracy, etc.), is a temptation that it would leave open, and leave
open notably to the survivors or the victims of the final solution, to NOTES
its past, present or potential victims. Which temptation? The tempta-
tion to think the holocaust as an uninterpretable manifestation of di-
1. O~the obf:que" cf. my Du droit ala philosophie (Paris: Galilee, 1990) es
vine violence insofar as this divine violence would be at the same time
~o~t~ (PLassdlons:BAn kOblique Offering," Derrida: A Critical Read~r. ~'a~rd
nihilating, expiatory and bloodless, says Benjamin, a divine violence ,e. on on: Iac well, 1992). '
that would destroy current law through a bloodless process that 2. ~:~~~s ;ot~on o~ creudit.' see, my Given Time I: Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy
strikes and causes to expiate. Here I will re-cite Benjamin: "The leg- , ort comIng DIversity of Chicago Press.
end of Niobe may be confronted, as an example of this violence, with 3. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
God's judgment on the company of Korah (Numbers 16: 1-35). It 4. On animality cf my OfSp"
. ' .
H 'd
ITtt: el egger and the Question trans Geoff B
strikes privileged Levites, strikes them without warning, without nIngton and Rachel Bowlby (Ch' U" .,. rey en-
f Icago: DIversity of Chicago Press 1989) Oth
threat, and does not stop short of annihilation. But in annihilating it ~e er~nces are collected in this volume. As for sacrifice, see the interv'iew with Jea~~
uc ancy, trans. Peter T. Connor, in Topoi, vol. 7, no. 2.
also expiates, and a deep connection between the lack of bloodshed
and the expiatory character of this violence is unmistakable" (p. 297). 5. And as fCo~ wh~t c~nsis~s, as St. Augustine would have said, in "making the truth"
see my Ircon,esslon In Geoffre B ' d '
When one thinks of the gas chambers and the cremation ovens, this rida (Paris: Le Seuil, 1991). y ennIngton an Jacques Derrida, Jacques Der-
allusion to an extermination that would be expiatory because blood- 6 Ed' , ,
. Itors not~: The follOWIng comprises the introduction to this second art of th
less must cause one to shudder. One is terrified at the idea of an inter- essay when It served as a lecture delivered at the UCLA coli . "NP , e
pretation that would make of the holocaust an expiation and an in- the 'Final Solution' ": oqulUm, aZlsm and
decipherable signature of the just and violent anger of God. . Rightl~ or wrongly, I thought that it would perhaps not be entirely inapp _
It is at that point that this text, despite all its polysemic mobility pnate to Inte,rrogate a text by Walter Benjamin, singularly an essa writte r~
and all its resources for reversal, seems to me finally to resemble too 1921 and en,tltled Zltr Kritik der Gewalt (Critique of Violence) at th: . n In
such a meetIng on Nazism, the final Solution and the limits '0 opeDln~ of
closely, to the point of specular fascination and vertigo, the very thing
against which one must act and think, do and speak, that with which
~:e~::I~ si~cermr lec~ure ~s also ~resented (~nd I am greatly ~~d:;:~n:;t~~~
H So~plta Ity f un er t e auspices of a center for Critical Studies and the
one must break (perhaps, perhaps). This text, like many others by um,an Clences. ~ I ~av~ ~herefore chosen to present a somewhat risk readin
Benjamin, is still too Heideggerian, too messianico-marxist or arch eo- of thiS tex.t by B~nJamIn, It IS for several reasons that seem to converge: g
eschatological for me. I do not know whether from this nameless thing i 1ci I behev(~ thiS uneasy, eni~matic, terribly equivocal text is, as it were e~:~nted
~ a vance ,ut ~an one say "In advance" here?) by the theme of radicai destruc-
called the final solution one can draw something which still deserves
tlO~, ~x:e~ml;atlOn, ft~tal,annihilation, beginning with the annihilation of the law
the name of a lesson. But if there were a lesson to be drawn, a unique an 0 ng t, I not 0 Justice, and, among those rights human ri h
lesson among the always singular lessons of murder, from even a ~~ thesl~' are i~terpreted within a tradition of narural I~w of the ~r~~ka~:~:s~:~~:
single murder, from all the collective exterminations of history (be- ufk ~ru~g tJ:'pe. I purposely say that this text is haunted by the themes of
extermInatIng VIOlence because first of all as I 'II t d '
cause each individual murder and each collective murder is singular, haunted b h ' , If b
thus infinite and incommensurable) the lesson that we can draw to- h 1 , W I ry to emonstrate It is
auntmg Itse , y a quasi-logic of the phantom which becaus'e it '
t e more orceful one, should be substituted for an ontologicallogi~ of presenc~:
absence or representation. Now, I ask myself whether a community that assembles
or gathers itself together in order to think what there is to be thought and gathered hav~ attempted to identify it, to assi n la ' . " ,
for It (as a philosopher a historian ,~ p c,es ~n It, ongtns to It, responsibilities
of this nameless thing that has been called the "final solution" does not have to
filmmaker)., The very singular mul~i~~ic~; O~t~ISt, as moralist, man of,fait~, poet,
show, first of all, its readiness to welcome the law of the phantom, the spectral
to say nothtng of other texts' the g ft Yf h tl e codes that converge 10 thiS text
experience and the memory of the phantom, of that which is neither dead nor ' ra 0 t e anguag f ' ,
that 0 f messianic revolution b th f h ' e 0 marXist revolution on
living, more than dead and more than living, only surviving, the law of the most h ' 0 0 t em announctn I
epoc, but also the beginning of t h' g not on y a new historical
commanding memory, even though it is the most effaced and the most effaceable, this makes it difficult to propo a ru: IStOry that has been rid of myth; all of
but for that very reason the most demanding. on the "final solution" or abo~et :n~e ~pot~~ses a~out a Benjaminian discourse
This text by Benjamin is not only signed by a thinker who is considered and impossibility of a discourse on the "fi nljamltn~an discourse on the possibility or
considered himself to be, in a certain fashion, Jewish (and I most especially would
like to talk about the enigma of this signature). Zur Kritik der Gewalt is also
wou Id be reckless to say relying on th b' 'd
na so utton " A "fi I I ' "
na so utton of which it
in 1942 and Benjamin's'suicide on th e; jectlve ates of the Wannsee conference
inscribed in a Judaic perspective that opposes just, divine (Jewish) violence that jamin knew nothing about it On 'lie Iranco-Spamsh border in 1940, that Ben-
would destroy the law to mythical violence (of the Greek tradition) that would , ' e WI a ways find w
accordtng to which Benjamin, already in 1921 ays, to ~uPPOrt the hypothesis
install and conserve the law.
than the possibility of this final solut' h ' was thtnktng about nothing else
2. The profound logic of this essay puts to work an interpretation of lan-
th e ord er of representation from h IOn ' t at would ,be ate II h more challengtng ' to
guage-of the origin and the experience of language-according to which evil, evil, from the fall as fall of I aVI~g perhaps ansen, in his view, from radical
that is to say lethal power, comes to language by way of, precisely, representation, anguage tnto rep , ,
constant logic of his discourse ma ' II reSentatlon, And If one relies on a
in other words, by that dimension of language as means of communication that is ft h ' , ny signs a ow one t th' k h £
a er t IS unrepresentable thing th 'II h 0 10 t at Lor Benjamin
re-presentative, mediating, thus technical, utilitarian, semiotic, informational-all '
are d ISCourse and literature a at d WI , ave been th e "fi na I so IutlOn," ' not only'
of those powers that uproot language and cause it to decline, to fall far from or n poetry not Impossibl b '"
more eschatologically than ever th y ff e ut, more ongtnanly and
outside of its originary destination which was appellation, nomination, the giving return or the still promised adv ' t e mlust 0 er themselves to the dictation of the
or the appeal or presence in the name. We will ask ourselves how this thinking ' f
en 0 a anguage of nam I
of appe II atlon, in opposition to a la f ' es, a anguage or a poetics
about the name is articulated with haunting and the logic of the specter. This essay , nguage 0 signs f' £ '
catlve representation: beyond m th and ',0 tn!ormatlve or communi-
by Benjamin, which treats thus of evil, of that evil that is coming and that comes guage of names, Something I trie~ to h rep~esentatlOn but not beyond the lan-
to language through representation, is also an essay in which the concepts of w
of dates and acts, At the end after th s °d e sewhe:e a~out Celan on the subject
responsibility and of culpability, of sacrifice, decision, solution, punishment or honZOn ' f , e en 0 f a readtng I th
0 Nazism and the fi I I" n e course of which the
expiation playa major role, one which is most often associated with the value of fl as hes of expectation and w'll na so urlOn Will appear I h h'
b d ' ~n y t roug signs or brief
what is demonic and "demonically ambiguous" (damonisch zweideutig). f h' I e treate only 10 a VI t I bl'
as IOn, I will propose a few hypoth ses h ' r ua , 0 Ique or elliptical
3. Zur Kritik der Gewalt is a critique of representation not only as perversion can today be read after the event feN ~n t e ways 10 which this text from 1921
and fall of language, but as a political system of formal and parliamentary de- Be!ore £ ' 0 aZlsm and the e f h fi
proposing a reading of th' . I vent 0 t e nal solution,
mocracy. From that point of view, this revolutionary essay (revolutionary in a style , h IS Stngu ar text bef 'I'
tlOns t at concern it more strictlv I I ,ore artlcu attng some ques-
that is at once Marxist and messianic) belongs, in 1921, to the great anti- '
Iengthy tntroduction " must a so say a few w d ' th'IS already too
about the " or S,tn
parliamentary and anti-"Aufklarung" wave on which Nazism so to speak sur~. , COntexts 10 which I b d
COntext was double and I w'll d fi ' , egan to rea the essay, That
faced and even surfed in the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s. If I e ne It as schematically 'bl '
myse to the aspects that may I'nt h as POSSI e, whIle limiting
4. This very polyhedric and polysemic question of representation is posed as Ieft so~e traces on my reading, erest us ere ' th'IS eventng, 'b
ecause they will have
well from another point of view in this strange essay. Having begun by distin-. 1.
guishing between two sorts of violence, founding violence and conserving . " First of all ,w'th' h
I 10 a tree-year semtnar' "h 'I ' ,
nattonaltsms " there was a y I on p I osophlcal nattonalities and
lence, Benjamin must concede at one moment that the one cannot be so in which, while studying theea:a~;egdsbequ~nc~ subtitled Kant, the Jew, the German
heterogeneous to the other since the violence called founding violence is Kant, 10 . deed to a certain Judais ' K ut tnSlsten t recurrence 0 f th e reference to
times represented (reprasentiert) by the conserving violence. 'IV1
wagner and Nietzsche to Ad • m 10 ant,
h on the part 0 f aII th ose who from
For all of these reasons and according to all of these interlaced threads to Deutsch?", I became very in~:r:~;e~o~g t ~o r;spond to the question "Was ist
I am going to return, one can ask oneself a certain number of questions. They :'Psyche, that is, the logic of certal' h n w at then called the Judea-German
be on the horizon of my reading even if I do not have the time here or the '(P h - n p enomena of ad' t b'
syc e also meaning in French a f' IS ur 109 sort of specularity
to make them explicit. What would Benjamin have thought, or at least •. ' of the great German Jewish think:~:ta~d mlr:o r ) that ~as itself reflected in some
thought of Benjamin is potentially formed or articulated in this essay-and ...... RosenZweig, Scholem Adorno A d wdnters ~f thiS century: Cohen, Buber
be anticipated-on, the "final solution," its project, its mise en oeuvre, the , " ren t-an preci I B ' , ,
, .senous reflection on Nazism-and th "fi 'I ~e y, enjamtn, I believe that a
rience of its victims, the judgments, trials, interpretations, narrative, g e ' , e na solutIOn" 'd
. ous, tntermInable and polyhedral anal sis ' -cannot avol a COura-
literary, historical representations which have attempted to measure up to it? Judeo-German "psyche" Am h h~ of the history and structure of this
would Benjamin have spoken, how would he have wished one to speak, to ' d' . ong ot er t lOgs that I '
;Ie certatn analogies which wer ' f cannot go tnto here, we stud-
sent, or to forbid oneself from representing the "final solution"? How between the discourse ' e SOmetimes 0 the mo t ' I '
of certain" G "s ~qulvoca and disquieting
great erman thtnkers and certain "great
German Jewish" thinkers, a certain German patriotism, often a German nation- 15 This "pI "b
alism, and sometimes even a German militarism (during and after the First World . . ay etween walten and Walter does n
certainty. That, furthermore I'S th d ot afford any demonstration or any
War) being not the only example, far from it, for instance in Cohen or Rosenzweig c , e para ox of't "d .
Lorce resuJts from the dissocl'atl' b hIS emonstratlve" force: this
or, to some extent, in Husser!' It is in this context that certain limited but deter- h' h on etween t e co " d
w IC I spoke a moment ago (and J I h gnJtJve an the performative of
minable affinities between Benjamin's text and some texts by Carl Schmitt, even a so e sew ere) . I .
nature. But, touching on th b I . ' precIse y In regard to the sig-
by Heidegger, began to intrigue me. Not only because of the hostility to parlia- . e a so ute secret thIS "J ". .
gratUItous. For we aJso know th B . ' . pay IS In no way Judic and
mentary democracy, even to democracy as such, or to the Aufkliirung, not only
Goethe's Elective Affinities I'n th aJt en)amln ~as very interested, notably in
because of a certain interpretation of the polemos, of war, violence and language, , e a eatory and Sl'f] '.
proper names are properly the site I Id b gm cant COinCIdences of which
but also because of a thematic of "destruction" that was very widespread at the
even .better chance after reading the wou f] e tempted to give this hypothesis an
time. Although Heideggerian Destmktion cannot be confused with the concept of
satamque et Ie bonheur-Les no d v~;1 ne ess.ay by Jochen Hiirisch "L'ange
destruction that was also at the center of Benjaminian thought, one may well ask h-. ms e wa ter Ben) '". Wi,'
est etlque, G. Raulet, ed. (Paris, 1988). amln In elmar: Le toumant
oneself what such an obsessive thematic might signify and what it is preparing or
anticipating between the two wars, all the more so in that, in every case, this
destruction also sought to be the condition of an authentic tradition and memory,
and of the reference to an originary language.
2. Other context: On the occasion of a recent colloquium held at the Cardozo
Law School of Yeshiva University of New York on the topic "Deconstruction and
the Possibility of Justice," I began, after a long consideration of "Deconstruction
and Justice," to examine this text by Benjamin from another point of view. I fol-
lowed there precisely, and as cautiously as possible, a dismaying trajectory, one
that is at the same time aporetic and productive of strange events in its very aporia,
a kind of self-destruction, if not a suicide of the text, that lets no other legacy
appear than the violence of its signature-but as divine signature. How to read
this text with a "deconstructive" gesture that is neither, today any more than it
has ever been, Heideggerian nor Benjaminian? In brief, that is the difficult and
obscure question that this reading would like to risk putting forth.
7. "Psyche: Invention of the Other," trans. Catherine Porter, in Reading de Man
Reading (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 36.
8. Cf. "Declarations of Independence," trans. Tom Keenan and Tom Pepper, New
Political Science, no. 15, Summer, pp. 7-15.
9. Cf. "Before the Law," trans. Avital Ronell, in Kafka and the Contemporary Criti-
cal Performance: Centenary Readings, ed. Alan Udoff. (Bloomington, Ind.: Indi-
ana University Press, 1987).
10. Cf. my "Rhetorique de la drogue," in Autrement, no. 106.
11. Cf. my Memoires d'aveugle. L'autoportrait et at/tres mines (Paris: Reunion des
Musees Nationaux, 1990).
12. Cf. Of Spirit, op. cit., and "Philopolemogy: Heidegger's Ear (Geschlecht IV),"
forthcoming, Indiana University Press.
13. This "mythic" dimension of droit in general could no doubt be extended,
ing to Benjamin, to any theory of the "rights of man," at least to the extent
the latter would not proceed from what in this text is called "divine
(giittliche Gewalt).
14. In putting this text of Benjamin to the test of a certain deconstructive necessity,
least such as it is here determined for me now, I am anticipating a more ample
coherent work: on the relations between this deconstruction, what Benjamin
"destruction" (Zerstonmg) and the Heideggerian "Destruktion" (which I
already touched upon and to which I will return elsewhere, notably in "
lemology: Heidegger's Ear (Geschlecht IV)."

Derrida - Force of Law

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What is the main topic being discussed in the text?

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1

Force of Law: The "Mystical Foundation

C'est ici un devoir, je dois m'adresser a vous en anglais.This is an

use this word, whether it's a matter of social, ideological, political,

ungraspab~e revolutionary instant that belongs to no historical tem-

dissuasion, as pacifists, anarchists or activists believe. The law turns

pure and great founders, initiators, l~wmakers ,("great" ,Poets, think-

ist das Vermogen, Diktatur auszuuben). ~his· capacity reqUIres a rig-

(Mentalitiit der Gewalt) that goes so far as to accept coer-

living (itber alles Leben um des Lebendigen willen: "Mythical violence

"demonic" amb1gmty of th1S my

daic) violence 1S exerClse on a l e

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