pedlt3_week6

But often while analyzing a certain ethnicity inscribed in language—and this ethnicity is a metaphysics (there is nothing pejorative in defining it as such)—they reproduce, under the guise of describing it in its ideal purity, the given ethical conditions of a // given // ethics. They exclude, ignore, relegate to the margins other conditions no less essential to ethics in general, whether of // this // // given // ethics or of // another //, or of a law that would not answer to the Western concepts of ethics, right, or politics. (Derrida 1988, 122)
 * // Ethical-political Discussions // **

The third remains //heterogeneous// both to the dialectic and to the calculable. In accordance with what is only ostensibly a paradox, //this particular// undecidable opens the field of decision or of decidability. It calls for decision in the order of ethical-political responsibility. It is even its necessary condition. A decision can only come into being in a space that exceeds the calculable program that would destroy all responsibility by transforming it into a programmable effect of determinate cases. There can be no moral or political responsibility without this trial and this passage by way of the undecidable. Even if a decision seems to take only a second and not be preceded by any deliberation, it is structured by this //experience and experiment of the undecidable//. (Derrida 1988, 116)

In light of this only ostensible paradox, should we take Justice seriously when she comes to judgment? Is she using the scales to deny her ethical-political responsibility for deciding, or, rather, is she showing what kind of ethical-political responsibility she is taking? And what is a decision that can do without the presence of the decider anyway?

And what does the hyphen in "ethical-political" mean?

And this is the possibility on which I want to insist: the possibility of disengagement and citational graft which belongs to the structure of every mark, spoken or written, and which constitutes ever mark in writing before and outside of every horizon of semio-linguistic communication; in writing before and outside of every horizon of semi-linguistic communication; in writing, which is to say in the possibility of its functioning being cut off, at a certain point, from its “original” desire-to-say-what-one-means [//vouloir-dire//] and from its participation in a saturable and constraining context. Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written (in the current sense of this opposition), in a small or large unit, can be //cited//, put between quotation marks; in so doing it can break with every given context, engendering an infinity of new contexts in a manner which is absolutely illimitable. This does not imply that the mark is valid outside of a context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center or absolute anchoring [//ancrage].// (Derrida 1988, 12)
 * // In Context //**

…a written sign carries with it a force that breaks with its context, that is, with the collectivity of presences organizing the moment of its inscription. This breaking force [//force de rupture//] is not an accidental predicate but the very structure of the written text... As far as the internal semiotic context is concerned, the force of the rupture is no less important: by virtue of its essential iterability, a written syntagma can always be detached from the chain in which it is inserted or given without causing it to lose all possibility of functioning, if not all possibility of “communicating,” precisely… No context can entirely enclose it. (Derrida 1988, 9)

But is there a confrontation that never quite takes place about this // force de rupture // hidden in the "internal semiotic context? "

Whence, then, arises the enigmatical character of the product of labour, so soon as it assumes the form of commodities //the sign//? Clearly from this form itself. […] There it is a definite social relation between men [sic.], that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things //signs//. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities //signs// with the products of men’s [sic.] hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities signs, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities signs. (Marx )

Marx, due in part to his never having existed, is not well armed for a confrontation, and his threat may not be serious. But his analogies between commodities and signs might be, and it is at least worth deliberating carefully over whether the revolutionary // force de rupture // is located in (or as) the structure of the sign (and whether this locating somehow pulls to the margins the labor of rupturing and its modes and relations of production).*


 * Experimenting and being a pretentious pain in the ass often sounds similar. Sorry.