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Violence and Life in the Work of Jacques Derrida and Theodor Adorno

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Violence and Life in the Work of Jacques Derrida and Theodor Adorno DePaul University Via Sapientiae College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences 6-2012 Critical ecologies: Violence and life in the work of Jacques Derrida and Theodor Adorno Richard L. Elmore II DePaul University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://via.library.depaul.edu/etd Recommended Citation Elmore, Richard L. II, "Critical ecologies: Violence and life in the work of Jacques Derrida and Theodor Adorno" (2012). College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations. 117. https://via.library.depaul.edu/etd/117 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at Via Sapientiae. It has been accepted for inclusion in College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Via Sapientiae. For more information, please contact [email protected]. DEPAUL UNIVERSITY Chicago, Illinois CRITICAL ECOLOGIES: VIOLENCE AND LIFE IN THE WORK OF JACQUES DERRIDA AND THEODOR ADORNO A dissertation completed in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Rick Elmore 2011 Table of Contents 1. Table of Contents …………………………………………………………………. 2 2. Abstract ……………………………………………………………………………. 3 3. Introduction ……………………………………………………………………….. 4 4. Chapter One: Violence in the Work of Jacques Derrida……………………….. 13 i. Originary Reparations: The “Violence” Before “Violence”……. 14 ii. Lévi-Strauss and The Violence of Ethnocentrism ………………. 27 iii. Four Characteristics of Reparatory Violence …………………... 34 5. Chapter Two: Derrida and the Critique of Non-Violence ……………………... 43 i. Philosophy at the Threshold of Death: Levinas, Violence, and Subjectivity ………………………………………………………... 44 ii. Arendt and the Tortuous Dream of Non-Violent Power ……….. 59 iii. Benjamin’s Violences Divine and Otherwise ……………………. 82 iv. Defining Sovereignty in Light of Violence and Life …………….. 100 6. Chapter Three: Violence in the Work of T.W. Adorno …..…………………….. 106 i. Guilty Dialectics …………………………………………………… 111 ii. A Society of Exchange is a Society of Violence ………………….. 124 7. Chapter Four: Adorno and Critiques of Non-Violence …..…………………….. 138 i. Non-Violence in Bergson and Husserl …………….……………... 139 ii. Heidegger and the Naturalization of History ……………………. 145 iii. Of Spirit, Of Thought, Of World ………………………………… 155 iv. There is No Natural Violence, Only Naturalizing Violence ……. 167 8. Conclusion: Toward a Deconstructive and Critical Ecology …………………... 172 9. Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………. 189 2 Abstract My dissertation offers the first sustained engagement with the question of violence in the works of Jacques Derrida and Theodor Adorno. I argue that the conjunction of questions of violence and with those of “life” indicates a profound sympathy in their thinking and suggests the need to develop a critical dialogue between discourses of life (ecology, environmental science, etc) and philosophy. In early works such as Of Grammatology and “The Actuality of Philosophy,” Derrida and Adorno contend that the structures of thought, meaning, and signification are necessarily incomplete and, as such, are always marked by violent exclusions. “Archē-violence” and “dialectics” are names for this originary violence. Both Derrida and Adorno argue that this violence fundamentally shapes thought’s relationship to the world. The notions of “reparatory violence” and “interpretation” in the works cited above give way in later texts to notions of “sovereignty,” “autoimmunity,” “identity thinking,” and “exchange” as ways to understand the passage from structural to empirical violence. Of particular interest is the relationship between violence and “life.” In their later works (Rogues, The Beast and the Sovereign Lectures, Minima Moralia, and Negative Dialectics, etc), this relation emerges both in terms of the violent denial and annihilation of life implied in the reductive logics of “logocentrism” and “identitarian thinking,” and in the question of “animal life,” the question of who counts as “human,” and who or what can be included in the “human” community. Hence, my dissertation situates the historical and philosophical concern for violence in relationship to the questions of “life” and, in so doing, enters into the growing conversation surrounding violence and environmentalism that can be heard across the humanities. 3 Introduction Towards the end of his Frankfurt Address, Derrida sketches seven chapters of a “dream book” he would wish to write “to interpret the history, the possibility, and the honor of this prize [The Adorno Prize]” (Derrida, F 177/45).1 Concerning the last of these dream chapters, Derrida writes: Finally I get to the chapter I would most enjoy writing, because it would take the least trodden but in my view one of the most crucial paths in the future reading of Adorno. It would be about what we call, in the singular—which has always shocked me—the Animal. As if there were only one of them. (F 180/54) This chapter would examine the indications in Adorno’s work of a “critical ecology” or what Derrida prefers to call a “deconstructive ecology:” “a revolution in thought and action that we [humans] need, a revolution in our dwelling together with these living things that we call animals” (PM 180/54). This critical ecology would be a complete change in our ways of thinking and acting in relationship to other living creature. This shift would necessarily entail a challenge to the logic by which humans historically have reduced the multiplicity of animal life (including the human animal) by grouping all under the singular concept Animal (a move which has legitimated humanity’s domination of nature and devalued what is animal in humans). Derrida suggests that Adorno’s work pushes us to think these concepts and this logic in a new way. This “revolution” would be in no way alien to Derrida’s own work, as this “critical ecology” could just as easily be called a “deconstructive ecology.” Hence, there is something in this question of the animal that resonates through the work of both Adorno and Derrida and 1 Derrida, Jacques. “Fichus,” in Paper Machine. Translated by Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005, 177; Fichus: Discours de Francfort. Paris: Galilée, 2002, 45. Hereafter abbreviated F. 4 forms a junction point between the two. 2 Derrida argues that this “critical” or “deconstructive” ecology emerges in Adorno’s work in opposition to “two formidable forces.” On the one hand, says Derrida, Adorno’s ecology opposes “the most powerful idealist and humanist tradition of philosophy” (F 180/55). It challenges the intellectual tradition that attempts to separate fundamentally what is human from what is animal. This separation forms the basis for justifying or naturalizing the “sovereignty or mastery [Herrschaft] of man over nature” (F 180/55). Thus what is at stake in Adorno's ecology is the very basis for humanity’s mastery of nature and general claim to sovereign control.3 Adorno is particularly concerned with the idealism, emerging from Kant, that “feels only hate for human animality” (F 180/55). He goes so far as to contend that in idealism “animals play a role virtually the same as Jews in a fascist system (die Tiere spielen fürs idealistische System virtuell die gleiche Rolle wie die Juden furs faschistische)” (F 181/55-56).4 Here Adorno is making a structural claim. In idealism, animality names that which must be excluded and annihilated in order to secure the purity, which is to say, the superiority, mastery, and sovereignty of idealism. For the idealist, we can be human only insofar as we are utterly cleansed of animality and particularly cleansed of what is animal in us. Built into the logic of idealism is the exclusion, degradation, and annihilation of the animality of the human being. This logic then leads to a self-denying, self-destructive notion of 2 Derrida makes clear in a number of texts that the question of the animal is central to his work. For example, in a 2002 interview with Elisabeth Roudinesco entitled “Violence Against Animals” Derrida says “[t]he ‘question of the animal’ is not one question among others, of course. I have long considered it to be decisive (as one says), in itself and for its strategic value; and that’s because […] it also represents the limit upon which all the great questions are formed and determined, as well as all the concepts that attempt to delimit what is ‘proper to man,’ the essence of the future of humanity, ethics, politics, law, ‘human rights,’ ‘crimes against humanity,’ ‘genocide,’ etc” (FWT 62). For What Tomorrow…A Dialogue. Translated by Jeff Fort. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Also see but Adorno wrote almost nothing explicitly on animality. 3 Adorno’s clearest critique of humanity’s assumed mastery over nature comes in Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Dialektik der Aufklarung: Philosophische Fragmente, Gesammelte Shriften, Volume 3 (written with Max Horkheimer). Frankfurt am Main: Sukrkamp Verlag, 1996. Hereafter abbreviated DE. 4 Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998, 80. 5 human subjectivity. Hence, Derrida contends that Adorno’s critical ecology opposes any force that would attempt to justify itself through
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