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• Title: Deferring Judgment: Reading Derrida's Reading Against the Grain (1).
• Author : Studies in the Humanities
• Release Date : January 01, 2004
• Genre: Reference,Books,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 349 KB

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In "Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority,'" Jacques Derrida states that Walter Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" has a "possible complicity" with "the worst" (1045), by which he means the tendency to irrationalism that was present in German thought in the period between the two world wars. He continues to say that we must judge the possibility of such a complicity, and that "this defines a task and a responsibility the theme of which (yes, the theme) I have not been able to read in [...] Benjaminian 'destruction'" (1045). Benjamin's text, he says, is too "messianico-marxist or archeo-eschatological for me" (1045). However, and precisely since this statement appears in the context of the lecture about justice that is Derrida's "Force of Law," it seems to me that there is still a space left to wonder whether the description that Derrida gives of Benjamin's work is indeed a just one. Is it just to say that there is no "theme of responsibility" in Benjamin's notion of destruction? Is it also the case that Benjamin's work can be seen without ambiguity (for Derrida does, in other parts of his text, recognize the ambiguity of this particular text) as "messianico-marxist"? How does Derrida interpret the questions of messianism and of Marxism in the work of Benjamin, both of which were the subject of so much debate during Benjamin's lifetime and later among scholars? Does Derrida do interpretive violence to Benjamin's text, in thus classifying it? One is left to wonder about Derrida's silence on these questions, particularly vis-a-vis his claim in On The Name that a discourse on responsibility (such as his, since it articulates the "task of responsibility" which he describes as lacking in Benjamin's essay) "must submit to the norm or the law of which it speaks (9). "Clearly," says Derrida, "it will always be possible to say, and it will be true, that a nonresponse is a response" (17). In "Force of Law" Derrida acknowledges that he does not "justify absolutely" (977) his choice of Benjamin's "Critique of Violence," but he gives no further description of how he sees his task of presenting this text to an audience, or whether he sees his description as a just one. How, then, is one to speak about his silence, or rather, how is one to judge it? In my own status of reader of Derrida's "Force of Law," I hesitate to claim responsibility for such a judgment, aware as I am of the forcefulness of Derrida's authority. As an alternative, and in what is perhaps an exercise in apophasis, I propose not to be the judge but a (self-elected? illegitimate?) advocate and present a different interpretation of Benjamin's "case." I will refer to other texts in order to try to provide different "evidence," different interpretations, with which I may defer the moment of judgment and perhaps even point toward a contamination (Derrida's expression [997]) or an affinity between the judge and the judged. This may be, after all, the reason why Derrida has kept silent: he may have chosen not to speak of his own complicity.

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