Nick Mansfield

General Editors' Note

The aim of Derrida Today is to see Derrida’s work in its broadest possible context and to argue for its keen and enduring relevance to our present intellectual, cultural and political situations. Its aim is not to conceive of Derrida’s work as merely a major development in thinking about textuality, nor as simply belonging to the specific philosophical discussions in the name of which some philosophers have reclaimed it. Derrida Today attempts, therefore, to have the broadest possible reference, from the philosophical and theoretical through the most aesthetically innovative to the most urgently political. It seeks to consider work that is rigorous and provocative, exact and experimental. It will be prepared to consider any approach to the reading of Derrida’s work and the application of deconstruction, as long as it produces valuable and useful insights. It aims not to be narrowly pedantic about approach, topic or style, or to police the Derridean legacy for its orthodoxy or purported accuracy or fidelity to a specific set of conclusions. Given this, the journal is not only about what we as general editors decide it to be, it’s life and trajectory will also be determined, even perhaps, unpredictably, by the topics and styles contributors offer. In this sense, we hope the journal will promote the ethical commitment of deconstruction; to an openness to the ‘event to come’.

Cultural Studies and the New Humanities: Concepts and Controversies

The contemporary humanities--from intertextuality to queer theory--are a minefield of new theories and controversies. This book explores some of the new ways of thinking about the traditional arts and human sciences, providing historical background, defining key terms, and introducing the ideas of the important personalities.

Destroyer and Bearer of Worlds: The Aesthetic Doubleness of War

The influence of the Romantic era on modern thinking about war is contradictory. The most important Romantic-era theorist of war, Carl von Clausewitz, for example, is variously seen as advancing a rational model of war as purposeful, or else as heralding the modern era of total, absolute warfare. What is the relationship between war as purpose and war as a self-regarding act, war as an instrument used to achieve certain specific ends, and war as the fulfilment of humanity’s fundamentally violent nature, practised for its own sake? How could these contradictory views both emerge from the Romantic era, and how could they subsist sometimes in one and the same event, where war is both a tool to achieve certain goals and an expression of superpower will-to-dominance? The argument of this chapter is that the way of reconciling this complex relationship is through aesthetic philosophy. War emerges from the Romantic era as fundamentally aestheticised. By this I do not mean that war is a princely, refined and elegant practice, nor that war is a thing of beauty, but war as the unique and paradoxical relationship between meaning and meaninglessness that Kant understood as the only possible way of reconciling pure and practical reason in subjective judgement. This chapter will trace the connection between Romantic aesthetics through Romantic era thinking about war to modern constructions of war in aesthetic terms.

Twenty Paragraphs of Written Instructions

Why would a man dream of being a slave? What is the Eros of economic and racial captivity? Why would you pay for it? The logic of payment and captivity in Moll’s case is far from simple, and in it is embodied an obscure account of power and freedom: a man wants to be a slave; he wants to pay someone to stage it: the man he pays is a servant and a master at the same time, bound by twenty paragraphs of written instructions clearly laying out for him how he is to be in control. He has no choice in how to exercise power. Power here is ambiguous and has become dissociated from freedom and agency. The complex configuration of power is also a re-configuration of freedom: the man who gets what he wants has power exercised over him, and the one who exercises power has no choice about how he does it: power without agency, powerlessness with agency. But there is also a racial politics here: we are talking about slavery after all, at the end of the nineteenth century, the century of the greatest self-consciousness about slavery in the history of the West, a self-consciousness from which it has never recovered, one that is an emblem of the will-to-colonialism the West has never succeeded in shaking off. Why is it erotic to be in the place of the person who, because of their weak position in the chain of global economic power, which in turn can be attributed to their race, has no power and can be bought and sold, made to work, used and punished at will? The nineteenth century was an era of the West’s selfconsciousness of slavery because it was also an era of freedom and of subjectivity, most insistently expressed as the liberal individual’s autonomy as the agent of political decision, economic independence and privacy of desire. Why would you use this autonomy to reduce it? Why would you exercise your freedom to give it away? Why at this point of history when freedom was being cried out for everywhere, for whole races and classes of people in their specific entrapment, but for all individuals as well, something whose value was to be taken for granted – the gift that nickmansfield

Introduction: The Political Futures of Jacques Derrida

This special edition of Social Semiotics is based on the colloquium ‘‘The Political Futures of Jacques Derrida’’, held at Macquarie University, Sydney in February 2005. The colloquium grew from a suggestion of Nicole Anderson, as a way of marking Derrida’s death in late 2004, and was motivated by two factors. First we wanted to pay tribute to the work of Jacques Derrida; not as a sanctified oeuvre to admire with awe and supplication, but as the inspiration to important and telling provocations, interventions, complications and extrapolations in the political field of thought. Secondly, we wanted to respond to the cheap and disgraceful way that Derrida was represented in the media after his death. A kind of arrogant and mindless scepticism was deployed against Derrida’s work, here and overseas, by columnists unwilling largely to step outside of a kind of sentimental coffeeshop humanism, a kind of 1950s culturalism, unwilling and increasingly unable to meet the challenges of the last, perhaps now, two generations of inventive thought. This lagging wannabe intellectual culture recoils at the open-ended and difficult, as if somehow the problems we face, in a world that is chaotically and unthinkingly globalising with only a self-obsessed blind giant at the wheel, were somehow simple and could be dealt with by dimly recalled Enlightenment platitudes*/platitudes that have themselves abandoned any ethic of critical engagement that Kant, for example, might have recognised and encouraged. We heard Derrida lambasted for being obscurantist, when it was Derrida who had done so much to unearth how texts operated, and the kind of hidden assumptions they sought to dissimulate. Derrida was seen as nihilistic, when one after another his books laboured to re-invent ethics away from the kind of moral dogma and judgementalism that, following Nietzsche, he saw as the epitome of modern nihilism. Derrida was a relativist, when he had argued over and over again that his thought made any kind of complacent relativism impossible. He was the high priest of postmodernism when he had defended himself against criticisms of his Spectres of Marx by asking where had he ever celebrated the death of the grand narratives, or repudiated the discourse of liberation? Derrida was attacked for being anti-reason, when all he had ever wanted to do was apply the critical apparatus of reason to reason itself. He was lampooned as a traitor to the

Refusing Defeatism: Derrida, Decision and Absolute Risk

This paper attempts to show how Derridas thinking on contemporary politics insists on several key themes indispensable to a renewal of democracy. These themes are, firstly, the issue of competence. Technical calculation in the military sphere—what Virilio calls logistics—aims to reduce the subjectivity and responsibility of human decision to zero. This denial of the problem of human competence removes decision-making from the democratic sphere by attempting to automatise it. Secondly, Derrida insists that politics requires decision-making that is accountable to the Other, that acknowledges its own impossibility, and that is thus subject to absolute risk. In an era when the population feels increasingly disenfranchised and political decision is consistently presented as inevitable and necessary calculation, these insights re-introduce into politics an insistence on difficulty, discourse, danger and responsibility.