Original scientific paper Izvirni znanstveni članek
DOI: 10.32022/PHI32.2023.126-127.9 UDC: 1 Derrida J.
The Achievements of the Politics of Friendship
Jacques Derrida's Upcoming Community
Žarko Paic
University of Zagreb, Faculty of Textile Technology, Prilaz baruna Filipovica 28a, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia
zarko.paic@ttf.hr
Abstract
The problem with the disappearance of absolute sovereignty from Bodin to Schmitt, as Derrida views it within his late (ethical-political) deconstruction, is that there no longer exists a sufficient reason for any effectiveness of representing the Other. Reasons are reducible to this or that form of violence. Everything must be dismantled and disassembled. What remains of sovereignty becomes contingency and singularity of the space between power and freedom. In this space, Derrida begins
Phainomena 32 | 126-127 | 2023
with the view of the Other and unconditional hospitality as a deconstruction of previous metaphysical politics of hospitality. The Other must be emancipated from the perspective of the subject's metaphysics and its inherent violence. In the discourse of politics of friendship lies the ground for democracy to come as a final soteriological solution for other headings of history.
Keywords: politics of friendship, upcoming community, Jacques Derrida, deconstruction of sovereignty, violence, the Other.
Dosežki politike prijateljstva. Prihajajoča skupnost pri Jacquesu Derridaju
Povzetek
Problem izginotja absolutne suverenosti od Bodina do Schmitta, kakor ga Derrida vidi znotraj svoje pozne (etično-politične) dekonstrukcije, leži v tem, da ni več nikakršnega zadostnega razloga za učinkovitost reprezentiranja Drugega. Razloge je mogoče zvesti na takšno ali drugačno obliko nasilja. Vse je potrebno razdejati in 186 razgraditi. Od suverenosti preostaneta samo kontingenca in singularnost prostora med močjo in svobodo. Znotraj tega prostora se Derrida obrne k Drugemu in k brezpogojni gostoljubnosti kot dekonstrukciji nekdanje metafizične politike gostoljubja. Drugega je potrebno emancipirati od perspektive subjektove metafizike in njenega inherentnega nasilja. Diskurz politike prijateljstva ponuja temelj za demokracijo, ki naj bi prišla kot konča soteriološka rešitev za druge smeri zgodovine.
Ključne besede: politika prijateljstva, prihajajoča skupnost, Jacques Derrida, dekonstrukcija suverenosti, nasilje, Drugi.
Žarko Paic
1. Deconstruction of sovereignty
What Levinas has taken from Heidegger and endeavored to "overcome" by ethical thinking as a starting point for the critique of metaphysics as ontology, Derrida continued in an articulated and even more radical sense. In the analysis of the ethics of hospitality and guest policy concerning Levinas, we often encounter Derrida's critical interpretation of the major concepts of the post-metaphysical condition—foreigners, refugees, and asylum seekers—in the discourse of receiving the Other as a guest in "my" (own) home and the emergence of a new perspective for the subjectivity of the subject. One of the constant motives we encounter, stemming from Derrida's early works until the 1990s, is the corpus of the modern theory of state and law, which marked the books like Specters of Marx, The Politics of Friendship, and The Beast and the Sovereign.
The notion of sovereignty refers to the logic of the metaphysical establishment of the rule of the subject in philosophy and the humanities. The main intention of Jean Bodin with regard to political thinking—justification of the rule of monarchies based on the absolute power of the kingdom as a source of popular 187 sovereignty—was also the task of Descartes in the ontological-philosophical sense. The question of the two bodies of divine and popular sovereignty (theology and politics) had its metaphysical origin in the Cartesian duality of mental and bodily substance (res cogitans and res extensa). The opinion of the subject in the statement cogito, ergo sum establishes the power of the supremacy of mind over body so that the separation between them becomes a matter of the functioning of the whole building of metaphysical concepts, such as "infinity," "being," "substance," "idea." That gap represents far-reaching consequences for the European formation of political identity. Sovereignty denotes the autonomy of the mind and the heteronomy of the body. Thus, it is logical to assume that Derrida must reckon with the legacy of this metaphysics of rationality and occasionalism from Malebranche to Rousseau. The main reason is that the subject of self-establishment denotes the power of the modern age, when the rule of the mind appears as enlightening systematic madness of absolutism. In contemporary French philosophy, the critique of the Enlightenment was most radically carried out by Michel Foucault (cf. Foucault 1984, 2-50; Paic 2013, 181-211).
phainomena 32 | 126-127 | 2023
It is interesting that one can even genealogically reconstruct history before and after the French Revolution as an event of a radical cut with linear history. From Descartes to Hegel, the creation of the absolute subject becomes a matter of the thinking process, which tries to achieve the peak of modern metaphysics. Sovereignty does not mean freedom by the act of constituting the external world of objects (nature in the sense of natura naturans and natura naturata), starting from the act of the foundation of mindful substance. It rules over the body even after its disappearance. How is that possible? Logos in the tradition of the Greek-Jewish onto-theology is always inscribed in the body by transcending it, and not the other way around. In the gap or rift between God and man (mind and body), the emergence of modern anthropology was already determined in Kant by the necessity to find a consensus between the fundamental world of the Law (noumenon) and the empirical world of facts (phenomenon). Derrida's deconstruction of the metaphysics of subjectivity aims to establish just that place of the "in-between," the empty meeting place between the two. The moment, when the act creates new thought and action 188 that arises with modern sovereignty, is already recognized from its structural or ontological violence. That is why, in the brilliant analysis of Levinas's ethics of the Other in the essay "Violence and Metaphysics," included in the collection entitled Writing and Difference (l'écriture et la différence) from 1967, Derrida could say that we might claim how what belongs to the structure of the thinking subject is a "totalitarianism of the same" (Derrida 1978, 91).
Derrida tries to deconstruct the concepts of cogito, subjectivity, sovereignty, nation-state, and modern Europe as the cosmopolitan order of mind. If we would want to clarify the controversy that has been so abused in contemporary discourse, not only in the social sciences and humanities, it is worth first recalling what Derrida himself self-ironically said about it in the book Positions. At one point, he notes that he had been dealing with the French translation of the key concept of destruction from Heidegger's Being and Time (Sein und Zeit). It is well-known that Heidegger's intention, before the turn, in the 1930s focused on the "destruction of traditional ontology," and Derrida had insurmountable difficulties with translation. What this term refers to in German cannot be the same as in French, where it has the explicit meaning of destruction and annihilation. Hence, he opted for what would be just like
Žarko Paic
destruction, but would be more appropriate to Heidegger's thinking. When, therefore, he chose the word "deconstruction" despite "destruction," the whole horizon of new meanings appeared to him, and with it the possibility for an internal "critique" of Heidegger. We think from language, and language denotes a riddle of the trace of that event, which has the possibility of changing the essence of Being. The rest belongs to the history of the post-metaphysics of Otherness (alterity), because the Other and difference direct the history of thought. Additionally, deconstruction also means disassembling and dismantling with the intention of a rebuilding (cf. Derrida 1982).
When the age of modern sovereignty of the people loses its power, the subject of the representation of the Other in all the existing systems of thought and reality disappears, from philosophy, science, art, culture, to politics. However, it would be naive to conclude that in this way the Other becomes free and sovereign in its heteronomy to the action-"subject." Instead of the "totalitarianism of the same," the possibility of "the totalitarianism of the Other" arises. In the global order of planetary technology concerning "the Holy wars" in the name of God and the final judgment of divine violence, we 189 can today see the worst form of cynicism. If the Other is irreducible, in which name can one fight against the politicization of the purpose of racial-national identity?
The answer might be paradoxical and aporetic: in the name of the Same, but substantially different. The Other, therefore, must be taken, not as another name for the subject, but without the power to represent what is truth and what is freedom, equality, and justice. This only means that the new universality no longer comes from the source as the foundation (arche), but that it is essentially un-grounded (an-arche). That is why Levinas had to compare his ethics with—conditionally speaking—"ontological anarchy," in order to shake the self-deceiving power of the subject who appropriates the world as "my" will and representation, to paraphrase Schopenhauer. However, violence in the name of the Other cannot be at the same time violence of the Other, even when it is ethically justified as the only means to fight against the sinister injustices of the world. Unlike the entire assemblage of the ideas of Western history, only one cannot be deconstructed—the idea of justice.
phainomena 32 | 126-127 | 2023
The question of what remains of sovereignty today, in the age of the rule of transnational corporate capitalism, can be answered in this way: all and nothing! Because what is "all" should be post-imperial sovereignty with a different role and function of states and the notion of political people or derived from their jurisdiction (citizenship). What remains is, and cannot be, sovereignty. The reason lies in the fact that in the post-national constellation of the global order (cf. Habermas 1998), we no longer communicate with politics as a liberal consensus of democratic power structures. Instead, the neoliberal and corporate machine of the global capitalism politics becomes crisis management with dangerous consequences for today's Europe, such as the refugee crisis (cf. Derrida 2002a).
We have seen that one way of changing the perspective in philosophy after the end of metaphysics, and that means in the 20th century after Heidegger, attempts to p erfor m this understanding of the ethical from the horizon of human compassion for the suffering of people. Derrida marks such a step towards the ethics of the Other with Levinas's decisive turn from any future theory of the 190 subject upon the Cartesian logic of power. In Derrida's late thinking of the politics of friendship, the last word of his philosophy can be found. Both cases are an attempt to find a way of overcoming Heidegger's path of thinking. All categories that have been applied by Levinas and Derrida are, in one way or another, the creation of ethics and the politics of deconstruction. This remains true, even when ethics for the global refugee order is strictly separated from the politics of hospitality.
What can be derived from destruction/deconstruction (Heidegger and Derrida) for the matter of Derrida's late ethical-political turn? Nothing but a farewell to the metaphysical theories of the subject and political agendas in the modern legal notion of sovereignty. The latter must be radically re-examined once more. However, now by no longer starting from the idea of the foundation and grounding of the mind that rules over reality in the discourse of absolute science of Hegel's paradigm, but by starting from the infinite demand for the establishment of that, which was in the metaphysical history, however, present and thematized, but only to establish unlimited (logocentric and imperial) rule of the West with the idea of integrating the Other into strange and uncanny "Culture."
Žarko Paic
The deconstruction of the concept of unconditional sovereignty is doubtless necessary and underway, for this is the heritage of a barely secularized theology. In the most visible case of the supposed sovereignty of nation-states, but also elsewhere (for it is at home, and indispensable, everywhere, in the concepts of the subject, citizen, freedom, responsibility, the people, etc.), the value of sovereignty is today in thorough decomposition. (Derrida 2002b, 207.)
The problem with the disappearance of absolute sovereignty from Bodin to Schmitt, as Derrida views it within his late (ethical-political) deconstruction, is that there no longer exists a sufficient reason for any effectiveness of representing the Other. What remains of sovereignty becomes contingency and singularity of the space between power and freedom. In this space, Derrida begins with the view of the Other and unconditional hospitality as a deconstruction of previous metaphysical politics of hospitality. The Other must be emancipated from the perspective of the subject's metaphysics and its inherent violence. In other words: it is necessary to free oneself from the matrix of the culture, which 191 presents itself as the universal human idea of freedom, and as the demarcation line between "us" and "them." Politics without sovereignty seems synonymous with Derrida's impossible claim concerning the messianic without messianism or religion.1
1 "This transformation and this opening up of Marxism are in conformity with what we were calling a moment ago the spirit of Marxism. If analysis of the Marxist type remains, then, indispensable, it appears to be radically insufficient there where the Marxist ontology grounding the project of Marxist science or critique also itself carries with it and must carry with it, necessarily, despite so many modern or post-modern denials, a messianic eschatology. On this score at least, paradoxically and despite the fact that it necessarily participates in them, it cannot be simply classified among the ideologems or theologems whose critique or demystification it calls for. In saying that, we will not claim that this messianic eschatology common both to the religions it criticizes and to the Marxist critique must be simply deconstructed. While it is common to both of them, with the exception of the content [but none of them can accept, of course, this epokhe of the content, whereas we hold it here to be essential to the messianic in general, as thinking of the other and of the event to come], it is also the case that its formal structure of promise exceeds them or precedes them. Well,
phainomena 32 | 126-127 | 2023
2. Hospitality and law
In the book Adieu a Emmanuel Levinas, Derrida emphasizes something we would like to call the axiom of modern politics and its associated philosophy of law. It concerns Kant's view of the law of hospitality. Namely, to someone who is a foreigner in our nation-state, because he or she is not recognized as its citizen, the right to a dignified life must be granted under the cosmopolitan law of hospitality. How to guarantee this seems an extremely difficult task. The policy must be reconsidered in the space of something that is conditioned, because it is a matter of the rights and obligations of citizens. Hospitality represents a particular right of the state to care for and supervise the lives of its citizens for the benefit of all, so as not to encroach beyond the limits of the liberal-democratic structure of the state. Of course, the inevitable addition follows: Kant was a classic "Republican," not a modern "liberal." By contrast, Derrida opens a possible move in the different direction without the turn towards the 192 relationship between cosmopolitan law and "the interest of the mind." Kant's postulate of eternal peace among nations and states, as well as the right of states to limit hospitalization to a temporary residence—what today is called "asylum policy"—as a refuge from persecution for political reasons of the suspension of human rights and democracy in dictatorial political orders, gives a new perspective of thinking. Namely, Kant's ethics is based on mental foundations (cf. Derrida 2001). Precisely because of that Derrida, in the interpretation of Levinas's proximity to Kant and at
what remains irreducible to any deconstruction, what remains as undeconstructible as the possibility itself of deconstruction is, perhaps, a certain experience of the emancipatory promise; it is perhaps even the formality of a structural messianism, a messianism without religion, even a messianic without messianism, an idea ofjustice— which we distinguish from law or right and even from human rights—and an idea of democracy—which we distinguish from its current concept and from its determined predicates today [permit me to refer here to "Force of Law" and The Other Heading]. But this is perhaps what must now be thought and thought otherwise in order to ask oneself where Marxism is going, which is also to say, where Marxism is leading and where is it to be led [ou conduire le Marxisme]: where to lead it by interpreting it, which cannot happen without transformation, and not where can it lead us such as it is or such as it will have been." (Derrida 1994a, 73-74.)
Žarko Paic
the same time his turning away from the theory of the autonomous action of the subject as a presupposition of ethics, hypothesizes two kinds of hospitality:
(1)	philosophical or ontological hospitality as a transcendental possibility and as an ethical turn of the relationship in the real world;
(2)	hospitality in its empirical causation and psychological motivations.
The former presupposes an ethical foundation upon the horizon of
responsibility for the Other as a neighbor, while the latter cannot be grounded in anything, simply because it is beyond the boundaries of mental action. The classical opposition between reason and passion in political action is brought to light here in its bare truth. What follows from this should be clear if we keep in mind what is going on nowadays. The European nation-states are trying to solve the "refugee crisis" by following "the law of the heart" or "the interest of reason." This constitutes, of course, the middle way to what Levinas considered his vocation, and that is to work on "the holiness of the saint," which has the features of the proximity of ethical-political turn and "religion." While Levinas ethically precludes all attempts to politically establish a community in the form 193 of a "David-or-Caesar"-state, the problem seems very difficult. Derrida starts from the assumption that two forms of hospitality ethics also presuppose two forms of hospitality policy. There is no doubt that the distinction between absolute or unconditional hospitality and relative or conditioned hospitality is seemingly akin to the distinction between "the sacred" and "the secular," the ideal and the real, and vice versa. This duality, however, cannot be effective without something that lies between or even beyond metaphysical distinction.
Therefore, the question of ethics as a policy of hospitality denotes a "religious" issue of man's responsibility as an individual against God. This means that the last instance of the answer is only the human conscience. In order to avoid such a bad solution to the dispute between the two over the establishment and execution of an ethical-political turn, Derrida must show much more decisively where to look for the place of the last deconstruction in general. Thus, this becomes the place of the upcoming community or democracy to come as an endless demand for justice. All other fundamental notions of politics in Western history are derived from the Greeks, Romans, Jews, while the modern nation-state derives from the cosmopolitan ideal
phainomena 32 | 126-127 | 2023
of global secularism (globalization): freedom, equality, and fraternity. Let us state in advance: the latter becomes the form or a kind of quasi-transcendental assumption of democracy at the global level only after the radical deconstruction of its contents. With regard to the philosophical issue of the Other as a foreigner, a refugee, and an asylum seeker, the question of the "other heading" becomes a problem of the thinking of almost vanished solidarity between different people in their irreducibility. Derrida calls such a phenomenon according to the philosophical tradition of Plato and Aristotle with the "sublime" word: friendship (amicitia, philia). Before embarking upon the analysis of how and why this ancient notion of human relations in Greece constitutes the "essence" of philosophy in the community (polis) and the "essence" of politics in the cosmopolitan creation of a "different world" on a global scale, some paradoxes need to be considered, along with the aporia of the ethics of hospitality as the politics of hospitality. If the problem with "religion" is that it denotes a "relationship without a relationship," by which people communally connect with what cannot be the primary issue of their 194 freedom, equality, and justice, then Derrida can distinguish religion from philosophy. He does this by saying, as part of a philosophical dialogue on "the return of religion" to modern societies of the global world conducted on Capri in 1994:
[...] the messianic, or messianicity without messianism. This would be the opening to the future or to the coming of the other as the advent of justice, but without horizon of expectation and without prophetic prefiguration. The coming of the other can only emerge as a singular event when no anticipation sees it coming when the other and death—and radical evil—can come as a surprise at any moment. Possibilities that both open and can always interrupt history, or at least the ordinary course of history. [...] The messianic exposes itself to absolute surprise and, even if it always takes the phenomenal form of peace or of justice [...]. This messianic dimension does not depend upon any messianism, it follows no determinate revelation, it belongs properly to no Abrahamic religion [...]. (Derrida and Vattimo 1998, 17-18.)
Žarko Paic
Why does Derrida, in such an almost quasi-religious narration of the upcoming (lavenir), avoid explicitly saying that it is a religion from the Abrahamic times to the present day, in uninterrupted continuity? Is this only for some unknown reasons of a Levinasian inspiration, in which, as we have seen, the greatest "madness" of the ethical perspective of the reversal of metaphysics arises from the fact that the place of God is empty? If, for Derrida, religion represents always just an "answer, not a question," then it might be obvious that this represents a conflict between thought and belief, philosophy and theology as the science of faith. For Heidegger, the future appears in the primordial dimension of the temporality of Being. To that extent, his thinking of events (Ereignis) is anything but messianism and eschatology. The future, for him, cannot be derived from the "present" as some other version of the "nunc stans" (eternalpresence) from Aristotle to Hegel. The event "is" going on in tje post-metaphysical circular openness. However, there are not any ontological differences between "Being" and "being," "God" and "man." Instead, in late Heidegger, this becomes a question of the fourfold (Geviert) of heaven and earth, of gods and mortals. Reconciliation between what was in the primordial (arche) 195 and what will come in the time to come requires a fundamental turn of the relationship towards the "present" as the presence of the Being itself (ousia). From the eventuality of the event itself arises a call to change the present state. This simply means that Heidegger demands a radical destruction of the modern dimension of time as "actuality," which arises from the annihilation of the Being itself and its transition from mystery to the rational throwing of thought as calculation, planning, and construction. The technical destiny of the history of metaphysics determines our "future." The reason lies in the fact that enframing (Gestell) denotes the essence of technology. In this way, it crucially shapes all our thoughts and feelings, all the "spiritual" exercises of existence itself. Religion in the planetary age of the technosphere constitutes no exception (Heidegger 2003).
The future that Derrida is talking about, on the other hand, has features of uncertainty, surprise, and unexpectedness. It is quite clear that in this sequence of what is contrary to the rational order of modernity with its cult of a straightforward progress—certainty, hope, and expectation—, the opinion defined at the beginning, by the Greeks as well as especially by the
phainomena 32 | 126-127 | 2023
Jews, by the notion of "finality" cannot remain intact to salvation and the final purpose of history. Derrida must deconstruct eschatology, soteriology, and the messianism of history. When religion frees itself from its necessary messianicity without messianism, it may be possible for faith to become faith in the Other as ethically and politically irreducible to anything but one's own "holiness of life." Such an event would allow the world to be more than the framework of the technological construction of life itself. When people suffer, religion certainly does not bloom, as one might think. Nor does ethics enjoy a temporary imperative to act against alleviating suffering. In Adieu a Emmanuel Levinas, we, therefore, encounter a thought that Derrida continues to develop in other writings and lectures of the 1990s with the themes as cosmopolitanism, the dignity of the citizen, the question of refuge, the ethics of hospitality, and the politics of friendship. What seems particularly interesting here, however, is that Derrida, in understanding the contingent and singular "essence" of human dignity, touches upon the Third as an instance of society and the state in the political sense, as well as God in the ethical sense of 196 unconditionality in saving others. The paradox is that the Third (God and his substitutes in worldly affairs) protects us "against the vertigo of ethical violence itself" (Derrida 1999b, 33).
When dealing with the "monolingualism of the Other" (cf. Derrida 1998) and discussing the biblical and contemporary examples of hospitality, Derrida also attempts to interpret Levinas, who, in the books In the Age of Nations (A I'heure des nations) and Beyond verse (Lau-dela du verset), discussed the Talmudic notion of welcome. The key point of his analysis is where he uses the term for the Torah: "city of refuge":
[...] Levinas orients his interpretation toward the equivalence of three concepts—fraternity, humanity, hospitality—that determine an experience of the Torah and of the messianic times even before or outside of the Sinai [...]. What announces itself here might be called a structural or a priori messianicity. Not an ahistorical messianicity, but one that belongs to a historicity without a particular and empirically determinable incarnation. Without revelation or without the dating of a given revelation. (Derrida 1999b, 67.)
Žarko Paic
What Levinas calls "city of refuge" denotes a refuge for a space of true holiness. Welcoming the Other upon the primary ethical-humanitarian act of taking responsibility for his bare life cannot cross the boundaries of time and space: the temporary nature of the refuge and the limited opportunities for the reception of the migrant population. "Cities of refuge" are located on the outskirts of cities, in the areas of abandoned barracks, citadels, fortresses, bunkers, and abandoned housing. This does not concern individual care and "foster care" for refugee families. Derrida, therefore, distinguishes two ways of welcoming and receiving the Other into a new space of changed nation-state sovereignty: unconditional or ethical hospitality and conditional or political hospitality. In the philosophical sense, when it comes to the fundamental statements of historical monotheistic religions, such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, taking care of vulnerable people who had to leave their homes by force or trouble due to wars, terror, despair, misery, and climate disasters marks a step from the discursive to the "messianic politics," upon which any possible Realpolitik can build further. At the key point of discussion in Adieu a Emmanuel Levinas, the transition from ethics to politics is shown. It 197 should be immediately emphasized that this does not mean the suspension and neutralization of ethics in the political discourse of the existing "laws of hospitality." On the contrary, it would be impossible to imagine that any "messianic politics" could exist without an ethical correction of its pragmatic goals and purposes:
[...] if the alternative between the State of Caesar and the State of David is an alternative between a politics and a beyond of the political, or an alternative between two politics, or, finally, an alternative among others, where one could not exclude the hypothesis of a State that would be neither Caesar's nor David's, neither Rome nor Israel nor Athens. (Derrida 1999b, 74.)
Derrida's commentary on Levinas's attitude towards modern Zionism and the criticism of the decision that excludes the Other in the name of the historical-messianic (religious-political) right of Jews to their country is something far-reaching for Europe's current policy. Messianic politics, regardless of the goals
phainomena 32 | 126-127 | 2023
and the so-called sacred right of the people to their state, is already substantially late concerning what seems to be the task of modernity. Nation-states with their fundamental canon of rights and population regulation represent an outdated age of disciplinary biopolitics. The latter can still be kept alive while the system of European relations between states designates the illusion of strictly controlled imperialism towards the Third World. The genocide formally began with the persecution of Armenians in the desert after World War I and the brutal Turkish extermination in the name of the fundamental ideal of European politics, as expressed by Thomas de Torquemada in late 15th-century Spain, when the remaining Moors and Jews were expelled, which meant a racial and religious purification from the last traces of Islam and Judaism. The true beginning of the genocide happened, when the Belgian King Leopold II in Congo delivered to death more than a million and a half people of black skin in the name of "civilizational progress" and the capitalist modernization of Europe. Rubber and copper were, therefore, more valuable than the lives of "savages." The beginning of the Euro-Western devastation of Africa represents 198 the highest stage of the cruelty of colonialism, the consequences of which are not mitigated even today by the "soft" methods of neoliberal capitalism. The problem arises when totalitarian ideologies and movements born out of the ashes of World War I, such as fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, took on the idea of total state and unconditional mobilization of technology, and, in a brutal "cleansing" of the geopolitical space, occupied population of other nation-states, ethnic and religious groups in Europe and its colonies.
3. Messianic politics
In light of Levinas's "messianic politics," which is a more ethically motivated attempt at an alternative between Zionism and liberal humanitarianism for those nations affected by the devastation and hardships of global insecurity, and a less likely scenario for an already existing European order of interest, the deficit of this widely proclaimed "otherness" cannot be ruled out. Why? Derrida offered the answer to that question, but in the same "messianic tone." We could call the alternative a farewell to the entire history of Western metaphysics. The symbolic places of that history are at the same time the topology of the end
Žarko Paic
of the history of nation-states and the notion of sovereignty. Athens was the cradle of democracy, Rome was the center of the republican empire, and Jerusalem was the capital of Zionist Israel; the bonds of religious particularism and the liberal formation of a democratic order are all stations on the path to what is the true "goal" and "purpose" of history as an endless "messianic task" of the democracy to come. The alternative, therefore, cannot be achieved from the idea of "the end of history," but must have the very idea of its "other headings." History that has been left without its subject (the people in the universal sense of the demos) and without its "being" (the idea of eternal peace in the cosmopolitan order of values) must be redirected to another path. There is no doubt that the whole set of ethical-political turns in Levinas and Derrida is a reckoning with Kant and his ideas about "the laws of hospitality" (cf. Bankovsky 2005, 156-170).
Yet: while Kant introduced the regulatory term of the mind as a meaningful nature, which is, of course, good, because the direction is always the ultimate goal of freedom and justice in the world postulated by God, aligning the moral law and practical action of man like a watch with the church tower 199 at Königsberg, for Levinas and Derrida after Auschwitz and the collapse of communism in Europe and the world in 1989 remains nothing else but the homelessness of the people (Unheimlichkeit). Kant was thinking within the borders of "common sense." Levinas and Derrida, on the other hand, transgress those boundaries. Instead of the necessity of the autonomy of freedom and the rigor of the categorical imperative of man, we are confronted with the case of the posthuman condition of life production in networked societies of control. Chaos and entropy rule at all levels of reality. The fundamental ethical drive can no longer be a hospitality out of the obligation of conscience before God, but a break with the feeling of utter indifference towards the Other, which is "not my problem." If compassion becomes the beginning of ethical responsibility to change the state of things, then breaking with indifference to the Other represents an act of active resistance at the level of individual conscience and collective responsibility. It should be borne in mind here that the alternative to "messianic politics" outside the space of historical influence of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem cannot find a new city on Earth that could be the center of a post-imperial cosmopolitan mission. This was clear to Derrida from
Phainomena 32 | 126-127 | 2023
the very structure of the historical movement as well as from his paradoxes and aporias of messianicity without messianism. There are no more great cities of history as cities of great ideas that have shaped history into a sense of the living presence of the people, its ethnic-religious reducibility to itself, and its selfish interests. Greco-Judaism cannot be comparable to modernity without Rome, although the latter is largely removed from the horizon of opinion thanks to Heidegger. Heidegger, however, corrected his aversion towards the heritage of Roman philosophy as rhetoric and politics, saying that the sources of the idea of Europe in the political sense were inherited by Roman republicanism (cf. Heidegger 1998). A citizen of Rome becomes a citizen of the world within the borders of the political universality of the Empire. Thus, the Roman is found more in the Christian than it may seem at first glance. The proof is St. Paul and his ethical-political messianism, which presupposes an internal change (metabolé) of the whole Roman set of rights and assumptions of human dignity (dignitas and humanitas) (cf. Agamben 2006).
In De l'hospitalité, Derrida constantly talks about "the two orders of the law 200 of hospitality," referring to Kant and his reflections on the temporary residential status of the "guest" in another nation-state (the so-called right to residency) (cf. Derrida 1997b). It becomes obvious that not only the definition of rights is changing, but also multiculturalism and interculturalism as leading paradigms of ethical-political issues in the world today. What is the relationship between the concepts of hospitality (hospitalité) and friendship (amitié)? For Derrida, it should be obvious that these are primarily "non-political" terms, but also "non-ethical." How is this possible? Many theorists of the political will point, with an undisguised pathos, to the possibility that "postmodern pragmatism" paradoxically merges with the ethics of communicative rationality as in the case of the almost impossible encounter of the opinions of Richard Rorty and Jürgen Habermas. The classical philosophy of politics, from Plato and Aristotle to their successors in the 20th century, with the paradigmatic figure of Leo Strauss, determines politics by purposeful action. By the idea of good, justice, and equality, history is progressing towards its goal. The essence of the political in the difference between politics can be demonstrated by saying that it is a matter of the groundlessness of freedom as an arché. But this freedom is already in conflict with the Ethical Law. This is especially true if the act appears
Žarko Paic
to subject freedom to the higher interest of the community. Antigone's case in Sophocles's tragedy shows the request for the universality of freedom. But not before the Law (communities). Instead, the truth is revealed before the ordinary face of universal justice. This is a case of questioning the boundaries between freedom and power. If politics represents the power to establish what lies outside the scope of the political, what "serves" something outside its autonomy, such as economic interest, cultural good, scientific progress, or religious dogma, then its desecration and reduction of other interests lie outside of "the interest of the mind," as Kant would say. It is a betrayal of the principle—the end of the political, in general. The most radical thinking in the 20th century was established by Carl Schmitt in the use of the concept of the political (cf. Schmitt 1932).
In Derrida's last major work, a kind of "grammar" of the ethical-political turn, written in a series of lectures entitled Politiques de l'amitié from 1994, the reckoning with Schmitt becomes an attempt to establish a completely different irreducibility. At stake is no longer the question of a political-to-politics dispute, but the real policy of the forces and interests of power of transnational corporate 201 capitalism and its structural changes in the 1990s, when the liberal democratic order slipped into the rule of oligarchic elites instead of "the people" (cf. Derrida 1994). This is, on the other hand, what Schmitt assumes in this drama of realization as a katechon of political theology (Derrida 2005).
In the case of Kant's consideration of the "law of hospitality," Derrida derives a kind of a farewell from Levinas and his ethics of hospitality. Kant's justified moral rigorism of the categorical imperative and Levinas's compassion as elevated to the level of a hostage responsibility of the entity for the benefit of the Other, were nothing more than two ways of facing a fundamental aporia of the problem of foreigners, refugees, and asylum seekers. The stranger represents the figure of the beginning of the uncanny turn of ontology into ethics. The reason lies in the fact that the stranger disturbs the nation-state by their non-rootedness in its "blood and soil." From these figures arises statelessness. This statelessness comes from the refugee status, from what today is called in the French sans papiers and in English stateless people (cf. Badiou 1998).
The reason for this impossibility of establishing any ethics outside the "logic of deconstruction" is that the Other cannot be guaranteed the same
Phainomena 32 | 126-127 | 2023
legal rights as a guest and a foreigner within the prevailing nation-state model. Admittedly, Europe presents itself as a cosmopolitan ideal. But it is a "fortress" of European citizens who leave their devotion to the civil religion of patriotism on the abandoned doorstep. Ethnicity and nationality in all forms of political recognition prevail over the universality of "Europeanness." The latter already entails aporias. Namely, ethics is becoming a consolation, and hospitality policy is limited to quotas for immigrants to be distributed across European developed countries. At the same time, the need for labor becomes a condition for the possibility of any further hospitalization. In this, there is no contradiction between capitalism and democracy, as the adherents of the dialectic in the new guise think. Despite this, Derrida shows that it is an aporia that comes from the space between the ruling Realpolitik and the real state.2 Thus, it constantly requires a change of strategy towards the problem of the disintegration of sovereignty in all aspects of that process. Of far-reaching significance for the future, seems to be the way of compensating for its power. The violence that follows is exactly what happens, when hospitality 202 becomes an issue of the concrete ethics and politics of liberal democracies today. On the one hand, there is conditional hospitality for migrants (quota policy), and, on the other, unconditional denial of the right to asylum and thus denial of ethics of hospitality in the name of defending the fundamental cultural values of Europe against the invasion of Islamism and terrorism. What is recognized from the possible turn of Europe towards xenophobia, racism, and neo-fascism in the discourse of the metapolitical struggle for "European culture" becomes an issue of the sustainability of European ideals of cosmopolitan order without an unambiguous European common policy.
2 Derrida shows even more precisely that solidarity with the Other in a situation of mass exile from the Third World countries to the democratic orders of the West refers to these groups: (a) migrants; (b) exiles; (c) the deported; (d) stateless persons; and (e) displaced persons. In this respect, the ethics of hospitality is an obligation and a duty to accept these groups of people, not out of mere moral obligation, but out of a sense of ethical hospitality towards equal people who for various reasons have suffered a terrible fate to leave their homelands (cf. Derrida 2005b, 4).
Žarko Paic
4. Friendship as politics or the democracy to come
So, what is there to be done? Derrida's answer to Lenin's question is clear: to think radically differently in the wake of "other headings." If neither a cold head nor a boiling heart is the right solution for the true politics of democracy to come, what is left? Reading Derrida's roadmaps of different thinking and opening of paths into the unknown on the same track, it might be necessary to say: there is nothing left! Neither the mind nor passions, however the relationship-based performance, set from head to feet, and vice versa, from Nietzsche to Deleuze or from Kant to Levinas continues, it cannot give us anything more than "great politics" and a "utopia" for what comes as an unprecedented event in history. If nothing remains of the entire metaphysical heritage of the Greeks, Romans, the Christian Middle Ages, the Enlightenment, and modernity—and all this is woven differently into Derrida's Greek-Jewish thought and life orientation—, then what does remains of what does not remain is salvific coming out of the aporia of foundation and at the same time fidelity to the so-called cultural identity of Europe in the formation of the 203 upcoming community. More than nothing and less than something that was and exists, but now with its shards leaves painful scars on the body, comes from friendship as politics. And it must, of course, be open into a multitude of headings and must be multiplied. What kind of policy is at stake here? Let us pause here. Politics without democracy makes no sense. This is the axiom, from which everything else derives. Since democracy should be based on the freedom of all and the political equality of peoples as demos, not ethnos, then it is obvious how the metaphysical framework holds this image from ancient times to the global image of the end of the nation-state. Sovereignty must make the breakthrough of the Other. And that, in turn, means that the frame cannot be removed from the image, because that would make the image itself lose its meaning. The framework in a metaphorical sense represents the idea of justice for the upcoming community (I'avenir). Therefore, democracy denotes a promise, repetition, and fundamental concept of Derrida's "early philosophy" (of the differance) (cf. Derrida 1978).
Derrida accepted Levinas's idea of the unconditional power of the absolute and irreducible Other as the "Big Third" (God?) whose place is empty in this
Phainomena 32 | 126-127 | 2023
world. The metaphysical event of transcendence in the encounter with the face of the Others changes history. The change relates to the teleological exposure to the grace and disfavor of the idea of freedom and equality of democracy. It is well known that in Greece women, slaves, and foreigners without a homeland (xenos) were excluded from the community. What becomes the main reason for the deconstruction of democracy as the basis of the best communities is that the human mind is constructed, despite the deficits of desecration, when the rule goes into the hands of minorities (oligarchy) or becomes deviant in the accumulation of the Orwellian-like power expressed by the saying "more equal than equal" (meritocracy), as an exclusivity rule based on nature, from which inequality follows. The modern model of the nation-state of the Anglo-Saxon manner of an establishment of community, where the difference is no longer determined by reference to the "will" of nature, but paradoxically to the "essence" of culture, from which then are excluded all those who do not belong to "my" culture, cannot be upheld in the cosmopolitan world order. These are historically constructed two paradigms of democratic exclusivity. The former 204 is based on nature and the latter on culture. Finally, after the disintegration of the idea of modern sovereignty in the late 20th century with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the totalitarian order of real-socialism, what was left of the historical legacy of metaphysics is to redefine the notion of "nation" without fiction. How is that even possible? Without the people as subjects above the national level, no longer just in Europe, but the world, democracy remains without true legitimacy (cf. Beardsworth 1996, 46-96).
With regard to the will of the democracy to come, Derrida had to clarify what upset Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. At a place of the book What Is Philosophy? (Qu'est-ce que la philosophie?) from 1991, they explicitly say, not without a utopian overtone in the footsteps of Marx and the social utopianism, that in the current order of global capitalism what is lacking represents a "new country and people" (Deleuze and Guattari 1994). Where else will we find the "ground" and the "subject" for furthering the madness of this linear history? Does all this still make any sense? To begin with, it should be necessary to redefine the "essence" of friendship by building on the experience of the thought heritage of the Greeks:
Žarko Paic
This concept of democracy is confirmed in the Eudemian Ethics (1236 ab): it is a politics of friendship founded on an anthropocentric—one could say humanist—concept. To man alone, in so far as he is neither animal nor god, is appointed the primary and highest friendship, that from which all the others receive their name, as it were, even if they are not simply its homonyms or synonyms, even if they are not its species, and even if they do not relate to this primary sense in a simply equivocal or univocal way. This friendship in the primary sense (ë protë philia), which is also the highest, if not the universal, sense, is that of friendship founded upon virtue (di'aretën). It is reserved man, since it implies this faculty of decision, of deliberation or reflective choice (proairesis, bouleusis) which appertains to neither animals nor to God. A system link will be easily recognized here between this properly human faculty (neither animal nor divine) of deliberation or calculation, on the one hand, and on the other, the concepts of law (nomos), convention (sunthékë), or community (koinônia) which, as we noted above, are implied in friendship as well as in democracy, and which, furthermore, 205 bind together, in their very essence, friendship and democracy. There is no friendship, at least in this primary sense, with animals or with gods. There is no friendship, either, between animals or gods. No more so than democracy, fraternity, law, community, or politics. (Derrida 2005b, 198.)
In place of the ancient virtue of prudence (phronesis), without which there is no ethics in Aristotle's sense, comes "universal brotherhood." People as quantitatively and qualitatively different are no longer shackled by nature as a culture, since the restriction of nature as a presupposition of the originality of Greek democracy is the reason for its exclusivity towards Others. In the AngloSaxon model, the universality of the citizen is limited to modern European and American cultures. Hence, the question of the irreducibility of the Other, from the American Civil War in the 19th century to the present day, becomes an issue in the realization of the ideals of Greek-American democracy on the soil of the modern empire. Friendship in the Greeks had no other function than to establish primary solidarity based on understanding and feelings for the
phainomena 32 | 126-127 | 2023
community. And when the situation is stable between "internal" friends, then it seems reasonable to expect that there is a possibility of a hypothetical "universal friendship" in the upcoming period of world democracy in a cosmopolitan state. However, it is clear to Derrida that there is a "tragic" irreconcilability between the irreducibility of the Other and the "community of friends." Who are figure friends in modern times of the loss of identity, when the refugees and asylum seekers change the containment and limitations of "friendship" in the logic of nature (the Greeks) and culture (Anglo-Saxon modernity)? Can anyone be a friend to Others, without deconstructing abstract forms of "universal brotherhood" as the achievements of the French Revolution? The question presupposes a distinction between two forms of "friendship" and two forms of "solidarity." Of course, it is Kant's distinction between unconditional hospitality and conditional laws of hospitality.
The first form of "friendship" is philosophical or ontological, and appears strictly assigned to members of the mental generality as a community that creates a universal culture of Scripture. Derrida is, therefore, referring to Plato 206 who chose the Greek word, which is also derived from the notion of the idea of a Being and a community of culture based on the idea of goodness, justice, freedom, and equality of all citizens. The Greek term for a sublime culture built on the foundations of philosophical insight into the essence of man within the limits of human and inhuman nature is—paideia (cf. Maurer 1970). We know that paideia designates a condition of the possibility of different friendships, because it connects the separated by Scripture (gramme) as a trace of literacy and mental "solidarity." Its opposite is all that what the Greeks, and after them explicitly the Romans, called barbarism. Friendship cannot be possible without hostility. And that, paradoxically and aporetically, causes friendship within the political community of equals and the free to rise to democratic virtue even above prudence, because it comes from a sense of mystical connection between similar people. The second form of friendship is the one based on an empirical sense of community out of "the interest of the body." It is a matter of individual affects and interests. Instead of a transcendental paideia, the heteronomy of cultures is at work.
If unconditional hospitality for Derrida denotes a regulatory idea, then the following should be kept in mind. Violence and hostility in political quarrels
Žarko Paic
between parties, states, and cultures will be no less intense than in the time of breaking with the logic of the banality of everyday life. It would naturally be naive to think otherwise. But if that ineradicable feeling of ethical compassion for the sufferings of the Other "serves" something at all, then it seems uncanny. We have seen that it is precisely this Unheimlichkeit that denotes a kind of condition for the possibility of ethics in the contemporary world. In an age without the power of nation-state sovereignty, it seems as if everything is being moved and relocated to the space of networked societies that are no longer human-too-human. Although Derrida ultimately demanded that thinking should open the possibility of a new re-humanization of the world on completely different grounds, it must not be forgotten that his "categories" from the period of the early deconstruction of Western metaphysics were of highly hybrid origin. They represented a connection between philosophy and linguistics, semiotics and cybernetics, systems theory, and information sciences. The problem we are dealing with here, however, cannot concern the issue of the inhuman as a contemporary techno-scientific construction of the event of the singularity of worlds. It is, on the contrary, a question of 207 the singularity and contingency of the Other as an alien, a refugee, and an asylum seeker in a foreign land or a world of absolute homelessness. Because the political for Derrida must rise above the unconditionality of ethical violence by establishing the non-reciprocity of political violence in the form of suspending and neutralizing the hegemonic force of "the totalitarianism of the Same," can one find a way to the same suspension and neutralization of violence in the name of the Other?
In this, Derrida follows the line of the political thought from Schmitt to Hannah Arendt. If democracy presupposes a community of friends, then it is essentially opposed to the possibility that the logic of self-love and profit of capitalism in the neoliberal understanding of the aims and purposes of history becomes the signpost of the democratic rule of the world. Why? Simply because it is clear to Derrida that "the people" as the subject of the creation of modern national sovereignty has been left without its unfounded foundation. We can argue that this is nothing but the freedom to decide about the meaning of history as the exploitation of the Other. Of course, no longer in the form of a primordial nature. Now, the rule of contingent and singular culture has become
phainomena 32 | 126-127 | 2023
effective. When freedom of decision-making is reduced to elections between the parties offered in the election race of parliamentary democracies, a gap arises between the subject and the substance of the democracy to come. Already in the time of Greek democracy, Aristotle determined what was created by the possibility of rule based on wealth, corruption of virtues, and intrigues of a minority that rises above the people (demos) and sovereignly rules in its name. This is, of course, the rule of the oligarchy. In the global order, it becomes the predominant rule, not the exception (cf. Rancière 1995, 1998). As previously stated, we can say that the ethical-political turn in Derridas thought appears as a reaction to the existing order of the oligarchy in the age of globalization.3 It is the end of the modern subject. This has the effect of making a radically different understanding of the world beyond the logic of capitalist globalization, when the rule of oligarchy becomes a different constitution of "the Earth." No less and no more, we find this at the very beginning of Derrida's reckoning with Schmitt's notion of the political as a necessary polemical relationship between friend and enemy in a permanent "state of exception":
208
Consequently, depoliticization, the "without politics" which is not necessarily the "withdrawal of the political," could characterize a world which would no longer be a world, a "world without politics," reduced to a "terrestrial globe" abandoned by its friends as well as its enemies; in
3 Cf. Derrida 2005b, 130. It must not be forgotten that Carl Schmitt himself, in his last major work, declared the era of European nation-states as a thing of the past. Instead of the territorial sovereignty of traditional apparatuses, such as European states until the World Wars I and II, comes the time of entering the "great space" (Großraum) with a completely different articulation of the political conflicts at sea and in the air. Geopolitics in the global order of state dependence is becoming a geo-strategy for managing all types of crises. Finally, Schmitt, despite the controversy of his political ideas, ranging from "the state of emergency" to the necessity of "political theology," saw it as no longer being possible to consider the relationship between politics and migration through the law of causality. Rather, it is feedback as in the cybernetics of inhuman power. In it, the system controls the environment based on continuous production as well as entropy. Therefore, Schmitt's "realistic" projection of future events and the emphasis on the theory of conflicts between existing states in the global world seems far more convincing, starting from the point of view of the so-called Realpolitik, than Derrida's deconstruction of the political by the binary oppositions of friendship-enmity. What else could be said, but: so much the worse for the facts! Cf. Schmitt 1974.
Žarko Paic
sum, a dehumanized desert. And this is indeed what Schmitt says—we shall quote him again. But he could say exactly the opposite (and he will say it later, willy-nilly). In both cases, the "possibility" of combat remains the arbiter: "A world in which the possibility (die Möglichkeit) of war is utterly (without a remainder: restlos) eliminated, a completely pacified globe, would be a world without the distinction of friend and enemy and hence a world without politics." (Derrida 2005b, 130.)
Therefore, the politics of "other headings" denotes the messianic politics of the upcoming age. To that extent, it is always and necessarily utopian. This makes a crucial difference between Levinas and Derrida, on the one hand, and, on the other, Rawls as a liberal philosopher of "fairness" community based on the idea of an overlapping consensus of particular interest groups and omnipotent common sense (Rawls 1971). However, the replacement of the concepts of freedom and justice does not mean that that, which is for the Greeks a beginning of policy, and for the Jews a goal of ethics, is fundamentally determined by the difference resulting from the distinction between 209 philosophy as logos and religion as a sense of what is fair in God's infinite wisdom. Neither philosophy nor religion stands is in complete opposition, when we deconstruct the form and content of their "promises." Undoubtedly, a friendship cannot be limited by the borders of the nation-state, corporation, or kinship of "brotherly and sisterly blood." It is no longer a matter of ethnic-genetic fiction of origin and attachment to the tribal structure of the genus. Like freedom, it cannot be founded. Therefore, its "nature" is, just as Levinas's ethics of unconditional hospitality towards the Other, irreducible and contingent— an-arche. The non-reciprocity and asymmetry of friendship against the logic of the interests of capitalist-organized exchange of goods between market participants suspend and neutralize the power of capital because of the excess and scandal of the uncanny event in the contemporary world. This event becomes a break from the continuity of history. With it, comes the new that is older than the old: to share with an unknown man of a different culture the "same" that connects us as human beings. Speaking in the tradition of metaphysics, the subject of community identification can no longer be the center of the interest of power. Derrida finds support for this in Michel de
Phainomena 32 | 126-127 | 2023
Montaigne. Friendship might be considered a "sovereign and noble" sense of solidarity with equality based on beauty and goodness of heart (cf. Derrida 2005b, 178).
What does the phrase, with which Derrida completes his testament to the ethical-political deconstruction of Western metaphysics, mean—the politics of friendship? A friend is never one. One should be measured with the One and one is absolute. It is love in contrast to justice that cannot be shared. In addition, it might be a singular event of bestowing the "metaphysical transcendence," with which the world becomes different, because only then does it take on the features of the same. Derrida did not deconstruct ethics beyond ethics in Levinas's sense. But he had to depart from Levina's rigorous anti-Kantian compassion for the Other. He did so for the simple reason of freeing himself from the temptation of a passively understood responsibility that blocks the radical politics of messianicity without messianism. In the whole operation of abandoning ethics and politics as a name for devotion to the essence of the modern representation of the Other—from human rights 210 to cultural differences—, what seemed inevitable was the abandonment of empty signifiers. The notion of sovereignty surpassed all others. It referred to the subject of ethics (the human one) and the subject of politics (the people as demos). But behind the scenes hid a faceless mask, the impersonality of both man and people. And without these two notions, democracy remains an empty narrative of freedom, equality, justice, and brotherhood. It was necessary, therefore, to deconstruct the last fictions of universality. Because man is always this or that man, black or white, man or woman, and the people are always ethnically marked, no matter what is it that bestows them with legitimacy— religion or culture—, yet a common kinship of community remains also nowadays. The singularity and contingency of ethical feeling and political action do not mean, however, that the "third" in the event of a change, when the Other as a foreigner, refugee, and asylum seeker opens new possibilities in the network of post-imperial sovereignty, becomes only a hybrid union of the two. Living together and sharing universal values might transgress all events, with which cultures become so closed and untouchable to Others.
Žarko Paic
Epilogue
In a shocking testimony about the refugee and from her own experience of fleeing Nazi Germany along with other Jewish intellectuals, Hannah Arendt states that the one to whom the name refers does not like to be signified in that way. Because of this, "refugees" in America after the Second World War have addressed themselves as "newcomers" or "immigrants" (Arendt 1994, 110). No one wants to be marked and stigmatized. And not even for humanitarian reasons by belonging to a group that has lost its home and thus its identity. Everyone wants only one thing: to be recognized as an "I" and not as the Other. Although everyone is different to everyone, he or she is more and more alienated and a stranger to himself/herself. The secret of humanity is hidden in that confession. A man reduced to number and function ceases to be human. Freedom opens existential possibilities without a foundation. From this unfoundedness springs the power of disobedience, even when life has become a collective drama of losing the "I" by reducing it to belonging to those who are different from the "innate" Let us not forget that innateness as a natal option indicates the origin of the word nation (natio), from 211 which the modern state arose. To be uprooted and to search for "other headings" of history after the linear one under the sign of "progress" and "development" disintegrated into fragments means, although it still rushes into the madness of the uncontrolled future, to admit that what remains of philosophy today has already long since been written at the very beginning. Philosophy, like human life on this Earth, designates the last trace of human dignity, no matter where it comes from or where it is going. In eternity lies the same path as a mission under the stars. Perhaps the best evidence of this seems to be the definition from the era of German Romanticism, the land of thinkers and poets, signed by Novalis. What might be philosophy other than the aspiration for a homeland and the desire for a return, even if this is only the last illusion? Novalis says: Philosophy is homesickness, an urge to be at home everywhere.
Being at home everywhere? It seems like an aspiration that opens the door to the upcoming times. In the uncertainty and suddenness of an event completely different from this indifference, in the constant course, history takes place after its end. There is not much time left. One should live it with dignity and sacrifice his or her security for the salvation of the soul. This is at the heart of Novalis's
phainomena 32 | 126-127 | 2023
wish for a homeland and the striving to be at home everywhere. Yet: not alone, but rather in community with the Other as my friend.
Bibliography | Bibliografija
Agamben, Giorgio. 2006. Die Zeit, die bleibt: Ein Kommentar zum Römerbrief. Frankfurt a. M: Suhrkamp.
Arendt, Hannah. 1994. "We Refugees." In Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile, ed. by M. Robinson, 110-119. Boston-London: Faber & Faber.
Badiou, Alain. 1998. Abrégé de Métapolitique. Paris: Seuil.
Bankovsky, Miriam. 2005. "Derrida Brings Lévinas to Kant." Philosophy Today 49 (2): 156-170.
Beardsworth, Richard. 1996. Derrida and the Political. London-New York: Routledge.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1994. What Is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1978. "Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Lévinas." In J. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 97-192. London. Routledge and Keagan Paul.
---. 1982. Positions. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
---. 1994a. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. New York and London: Routledge.
---. 1994b. Politiques de l'amitié. Paris: Galilée.
---. 1997a. Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas. Paris: Galilée.
---. 1997b. De l'hospitalité. Paris: Calman-Lévy.
---. 1998. Monolingualism of the Other: The Prosthesis of Origin. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
---. 1999a. Donner la mort. Paris: Galilée.
---. 1999b. Adieu to Emmanuel Lévinas. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
---. 2001. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. London-New York: Routledge.
---. 2002a. "Globalization, Peace, and Cosmopolitanism." In J. Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971-2001. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Žarko Paic
---. 2002b. "The University without Condition." In J. Derrida, Without Alibi. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
---. 2005a. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
---. 2005b. Politics of Friendship. London-New York: Verso. ---. 2009. The Beast and the Sovereign. Vol I. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Derrida, Jacques, and Gianni Vattimo (eds.). 1998. Religion. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1984. "What is Enlightenment?" In The Foucault Reader, ed. by P. Rabinow, trans. by C. Porter, 32-50. New York: Pantheon Books.
Habermas, Jürgen. 2001. The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1998. Einführung in die Metaphysik. Tübingen: M. Niemeyer.
---. 2003. Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). GA 65. Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann.	213
Maurer, Reinhart K. 1970. Plato's "State" and Democracy. Berlin: W. de Gruyter.
Paic, Žarko. 2005. Politika identiteta: Kultura kao nova ideologija. Zagreb: Antibarbarus.
---. 2011. Posthumano stanje: Kraj čovjeka i mogucnosti druge povijesti. Zagreb: Litteris.
---. 2013. "Pitanje o prosvjetiteljstvu: Foucault i kritika modernosti." Studia Lexicographica 7 (2): 181-211.
Rancière, Jacques. 1995. La Mésentente: Politique et la philosophie. Paris: Galilée.
---. 1998. Au bords du politique. Paris: Gallimard.
Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. New York: Harvard University Press. Schmitt, Carl. 1932. Der Begriff des Politischen. München—Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot.
---. 1974. Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.
phainomena
REVIJA ZA FENOMENOLOGIJO IN HERMENEVTIKO JOURNAL OF PHENOMENOLOGY AND HERMENEUTICS
Phainomena 32 | 124-125 | June 2023
Passages | Prehodi
Alfredo Rocha de la Torre | Miklos Nyirô | Dario Vuger | Ming-Hon Chu | Maxim D. Miroshnichenko | Jaroslava Vydrova | Malwina Rolka | René Dentz | Igor W. Kirsberg | Izak Hudnik Zajec | Primož Turk | Adriano Fabris
Phainomena 31 | 122-123 | November 2022
Cathrin Nielsen - Hans Rainer Sepp - Dean Komel (Hrsg. | Eds. I Dirs.) Eugen Fink
Annäherungen | Approaches | Rapprochements
Cathrin Nielsen | Hans Rainer Sepp | Alexander Schnell | Giovanni Jan Giubilato | Lutz Niemann | Karel Novotny | Artur R. Boelderl | Jakub Capek | Marcia Sa Cavalcante Schuback | Dominique F. Epple | Anna Luiza Coli | Annika Schlitte | Istvan Fazakas
Phainomena | 31 | 120-121 | June 2022
Andrzej Wiercinski & Andrej Božič (Eds.) Hermeneutics and Literature
Andrzej Wiercinski | John T. Hamilton | Holger Zaborowski | Alfred Denker | Jafe Arnold | Mateja Kurir Borovčic | Kanchana Mahadevan | Alenka Koželj | William Franke | Monika Brzostowicz-Klajn | Julio Jensen | Malgorzata Holda | Ramsey Eric Ramsey | Beata Przymuszala | Michele Olzi | Simeon Theojaya | Sazan Kryeziu | Nysret Krasniqi | Patryk Szaj | Monika Jaworska-Witkowska | Constantinos V. Proimos | Kamila Drapalo | Andrej Božič | Aleš Košar | Babette Babich
INSTITUTE NOVA REVIJA FOR THE HUMANITIES
INR
0 phainomena
PHENOMENOLOGICAL SOCIE1Y OF LJUBLJANA
977131833620412627