Gregg Lambert

Une Grande Politique, or the New Philosophy of Right?

Abstract This article examines the transformation of the concept of ‘natural right’ in the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, contrasted with Jacques Derridas ‘deconstruction’ of the discourse of rights, which is more concerned with the limitations of traditional philosophical discourse than with the creation of a new philosophy of right.

THE SUBJECT OF LITERATURE BETWEEN DERRIDA AND DELEUZE - law or life?

In this essay I would like to address what is arguably the most critical and productive subjects with which to compare and contrast the philosophies of Derrida and Deleuze, the subject of literature. The work of both thinkers privileges their relation to the literary process as well as to certain modern writers that they share in common. It is perhaps due to this affiliation that Derrida comes later to confess in his eulogy that “Deleuze remains no doubt, despite so many dissimilarities, the one to whom I have always considered myself closest among all of this ‘generation.’”1 (Although anyone familiar with Derrida’s mode of confession should already be aware that such a statement is full of potential contradictions and qualifications, so at the same time one must also allow for the opposite sense – that Deleuze is perhaps the one he feels most remote from in this generation of French philosophers.) At the same time, their own statements on the difference between their treatment of the question of literature have been scant and, particularly in the case of Deleuze, there is little evidence that he has confronted the full weight of Derrida’s writings on literature after Of Grammatology (1967/1976). For the purposes of my comparative investigation concerning the status of the “question of literature” in the work of both philosophers, I will focus my attention on two “exemplary cases” that Derrida and Deleuze could be said to share in common: the cases of Antonin Artaud and Herman Melville’s “Bartelby, the Scrivener.” Before turning to examine these cases, however, I must pause to explicate the middle of this proposition that Derrida and Deleuze share something in common with regard to the question of literature, particularly something so enigmatic as the figures of Artaud and Bartelby. The terms partage and partager already invoke the Derridean construction of “sharing” which primarily means “to divide”; actually, the logic of something shared in common refers more to the particular manner of dividing things up, perhaps even the same thing, than to the sense of having something in common. For example, one can have a “share” (partage) in the public stocks of a company, in contemporary market terminology, and this does not have anything to do with a simple concept of sharing, and does not even require that the shareholders know one another. According to Robert, the word “partager” can also be defined as the manner of dividing a set

“enemy” ( der Feind )

My contribution to this forum is drawn from my current project in which I attempt to think a thoroughly ‘‘post-war’’ concept of ‘‘the friend’’ (philos), departing from Gilles Deleuze’s later philosophy, but also from other sources, including Blanchot, Derrida, Agamben and Schmitt. By placing the Greek word ‘‘philos’’ in quotation marks, I am only invoking the common philosophical metaphor that has overdetermined our understanding of the political as a higher realm of friendship. In his last work written with Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, Deleuze argues very elliptically that this is an understanding that has been placed ‘‘in distress,’’ so much so that the early philosophical analogy may no longer designate a ‘‘living category’’ from which the idea of political association can be thought. By the term ‘‘post-war’’ not only am I referring to the historical period of post-war societies – that is, the period we continue to be in the process of departing from, but have not yet left, a period that makes of us all, in a very strange way, survivors and deportees – but, rather, I am also referring to the overturning of the Platonic ground of an earlier philosophical idealism that invoked friendship as the destination of the political, and the emergence in its place of what I will call a non-philosophical understanding that has determined war (polemos), and even ‘‘permanent war,’’ as the ultimate ground from which any realistic understanding of the concept of the political must depart. Certainly, two thinkers who come immediately to mind who could be employed to demonstrate this nonphilosophical understanding are Schmitt and Marx (the latter for reasons that would need to be reserved for another occasion); therefore, in keeping with this tradition, before approaching this problem from the earlier philosophical understanding of friendship (philia), I feel we must first turn to the concept of ‘‘the enemy’’ (der Feind) that has appeared decisively in the writings of Carl Schmitt, specifically in The Concept of the Political (1932). As we know from several recent commentaries on Schmitt, particularly those offered by Agamben and Derrida, in this work Schmitt focuses almost exclusively on what he calls ‘‘the concrete situations’’ of the determination of the enemy relationship in order to arrive at what he claims to be a pure concept of the political as being, first of all, founded upon the need to determine the friend–enemy distinction – i.e., the need to identify the enemy of my gregg lambert