This article argues that Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Friendship presents an implicit but significant critique of Maurice Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community. In Blanchot’s text, the Other disrupts any sense of fusional or essentialist community. But Derrida criticises Blanchot for neglecting the need to negotiate my responsibility to infinite others. Derrida proposes a logic of the plus un, playing on this double meaning in French, where a need to count singularities (‘plus one’) disrupts the unity of community (‘no longer one’). For Derrida, this offers a greater emphasis on those outside the boundaries of constituted communities, something he finds lacking in Blanchot. I demonstrate that Derrida’s position is a challenge to an emerging xenophobic discourse in 1980s French politics. I propose, therefore, that Derrida’s difference with Blanchot is motivated as much by a political difference as a philosophical one, with Derrida judging Blanchot’s account inadequate for contemporary political concerns.

This article considers Sarah Kofman's interpretation of Molière's Dom Juan in ‘The art of not paying one's debts’. It argues that this neglected text addresses important questions of moral debt and that Dom Juan's failure to reject all debt is of central importance. Building on this, the article shows how Kofman proposes a form of affirmative creation which involves the rejection of a sexual economy shared by Kant, Freud and Dom Juan. It then turns to Nietzsche to explain this failure: we see that Dom Juan's insistence on the maternal in fact limits the self-creation that he desires. The article argues that Kofman understands the maternal as a limit on our capacity for creating a more just moral law. The case of Dom Juan, therefore, allows us to see that Kofman's affirmative creation involves the creation of new categories beyond the maternal and paternal.

This chapter analyses the figure of the couple of friends in Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Friendship. It proposes that Derrida’s critique of fraternity as a model of friendship and political community is also intimately tied to a conception of friendship as between two (male) people. Derrida brings forward the prominence of this figure in Michel de Montaigne and Immanuel Kant. In both, Derrida shows how this presentation of the couple is motivated by a double and contradictory desire: on the one hand, a wish to represent the couple as an apolitical or pre-political moment of friendship, and on the other, a view that it should serve as a ground for and guide to politics. This chapter proposes that Derrida sees something of this problem in Levinas’s own conception of the face-to-face, whereby the relation to the other still holds some possibility of a pre-political relation (before the arrival of the third-party). This can help illuminate Derrida’s response to Levinas’s later work. Furthermore, through this, we come to see that Derrida views every relation to the other, and every potential moment of friendship and community, as fundamentally and inescapably political.

No abstract

In this article, I consider the role of institutions in Jacques Derrida's political engagement. In spite of Derrida's significant involvement with political causes throughout his life, his engagements have received little sustained attention, and this is particularly true of his work with institutions. I turn to two such cases, the Collège international de philosophie and the Parlement international des écrivains and argue that these represent an alternative mode of institutionalisation. These institutions seek to destabilise other institutions as well as themselves. Looking closely at the institutions that Derrida founded, we see three common characteristics emerge. These institutions are anti-hegemonic, self-reflexive and international. I then connect these to Derrida's thought, offering a reading of the undecidable, which brings forth the importance of conventions in the decision. Finally, I demonstrate that the three shared characteristics of Derrida's institutions form part of an effort to open up space for the possibility of alterity. Through this, and beyond a distinction between theory/practice, we come to see Derrida's institutional engagements as an active form of critique, both of other institutions and themselves.