Crockett Clayton - Derrida after the end of writing: political theology and new materialism

Derrida after the End of Writing

Series Board

James Bernauer

Drucilla Cornell

Thomas R. Flynn

Kevin Hart

Richard Kearney

Jean-Luc Marion

Adriaan Peperzak

Thomas Sheehan

Hent de Vries

Merold Westphal

Michael Zimmerman

John D. Caputo, series editor

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Crockett, Clayton, 1969 author.

Title: Derrida after the end of writing : political theology and new materialism / Clayton Crockett.

Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Fordham University Press, 2017. | Series: Perspectives in Continental philosophy | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017003972 | ISBN 9780823277834 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780823277841 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Derrida, Jacques. | Religion. | Political sciencePhilosophy.

Classification: LCC B2430.D484 C76 2017 | DDC 194dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017003972

Printed in the United States of America

20191854321

First edition

for Jack, for Jacques and Everything After

Contents

Derrida after the End of Writing

This is a book about Jacques Derrida. In it I try to open up some new ways to read his philosophy by focusing on his emphasis on religion and politics toward the end of his career, and then using this to develop a more materialist reading of Derrida. I have had a lot of inspiration for this project, including the work of John D. Caputo, Catherine Malabou, and Karen Barad. My contention is that Derridas thought remains important; it cannot be relegated to the dust-bin of some latetwentieth-century linguistic idealism and subjectivist constructivism that just plays with language. This has always been the wrong understanding of Derrida, from its earliest incarnation, but this bad reading has been reasserted with some of the newer theoretical currents in the twenty-first, such as Speculative Realism, New Materialism, and Object-Oriented-Ontology, not to mention the political Lacanianism of Slavoj iek and Alain Badiou.

Here I do claim that something changes in Derridas work, but this shift cannot be described precisely as a turn. Using Malabous idea of a motor scheme, an organizing image of thought or root metaphor that expresses the broadest information of a time period or epoch, I suggest that Derridas philosophy works mostly within the motor scheme of writing. At a certain point, however, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, this cultural-intellectual-technological scheme of writing evolves into a motor scheme that Malabou describes as one of plasticity. For Derrida, the works of the 1990s and early 2000s are different because they are written in some ways as a response to and expression of this change of scheme. In effect, the concerns of ethics, politics, and religion emerge into the foreground as writing becomes more and more backgrounded. Michael Naas gets at the heart of what animates Derridas work with the title of his important book, Miracle and Machine , because Derrida is explicitly more engaged with the tension between belief and responsibility as a kind of singular, miraculous living event and the repetition of a kind of machinic technicity that exposes this life to a form of death from the beginning.

We struggle to read Derrida because something is different and we are not sure what it is. I think that Malabous notion of a motor scheme and her distinction between writing and plasticity as motor schemes are important heuristics for helping us understand Derrida. I am less invested in as sharp a distinction as Malabou makes with this change in scheme, but I am using it to explore what it would mean to read Derrida beyond the scheme of writing. Malabou collapses the two sides of Derridas later work, the responsibility of the living being and the mechanical repetition that gives death, into her understanding of neurobiological form, which is characterized by plasticity. For his part, Derrida increasingly adopts a biological metaphor of auto-immunity to make sense of religion and politics, most significantly in his explicit essay on religion, Faith and Knowledge. This notion of auto-immunity exceeds any simple or even extended sense of writing.

I claim, then, that something changes in Derridas later work that is not simply a turn, but a more background context of and for his work, which is well articulated with Malabous idea of a motor scheme. There is a kind of transition from an intellectual motor scheme based on writing in a broad sense to one based on what Derrida sometimes characterizes in terms of the machinic, teletechnology, or technoscience, and Malabou calls plasticity. Arthur Bradley calls this situation an originary technicity in his book on technology from Marx to Derrida. This transformation in the 1980s and 1990s changes how Derrida writes and how he is read in his later work. Caputo is one of the first American readers to really appreciate this, although he presents his interpretation more in terms of religion than in terms of plasticity or technicity. But I think that many of the arguments about Derridas engagements with religion and with politics in his later work are tied to this shift in one way or another. Its not that Derrida changes his philosophy; he is clear about how consistent his interests, ideas, and themes are across his career. Rather, something has changed in the background or the cultural and intellectual context of how we read him.

My interpretation, however, is not just about getting the correct exegesis of Derridas works. It also consists of an intervention concerned with developing a constructive understanding of Derrida that shows his continuing relevance for contemporary philosophical discussions, including those concerning New Materialism, speculative realism, ideas about ecology and the natural sciences, and object-oriented ontology. That is, within a new intellectual context in the twenty-first century, we need new resources and new ways of seeing how his thought is important and relevant beyond simple polemics (whether pro or anti). Here is where I constructively engage Derrida with Jacques Lacan, to a certain extent, and also with Caputos radical theology, with Malabous biological materialism, and with Barads understanding of quantum physics as a materialist hauntology.

To read and think about Derrida beyond the motor scheme of writing is to engage with the religious and political significance of his later work. I want to take this one step further and argue that working through these political and religious themes opens the possibility for a more materialist interpretation of Derrida. Derrida certainly kept a critical distance from materialism; he does not use this term in a positive sense. At the same time, I think that the non-reductionist materialism expressed in terms of New Materialism offers important tools to understand Derrida. In some ways, I am appropriating Derrida as a new materialist, but I dont think that deconstruction proscribes such an entanglement.