Interpretation of the pre-ethical difference On the problem of nature and violence in (the work of) Jacques Derrida.

Ethics is the human characteristic. In hardly any other area does it become clear what sets man apart from all other beings, animals or even plants, than in the fact that man does not only act, but even more reflects about his deeds and distinguishes good from evil. Here, thus, it remains ambivalent whether man himself – based on pure autonomy – creates laws (rules) of his actions and chooses freely or whether he is bound to certain laws, which are given and withdrawn, by someone else. On the background of this roughly summarized debate between autonomy and heteronomy the following thoughts focus on some remarks by Jacques Derrida. He did not – maybe wrongfully1 – go down in history as a philosopher of ethics, yet he dealt with the relation of nature and violence from the beginning of his literary work on. Derrida’s position stretches between his critic of the metaphysical focus of the Occident on the idea of presence (1) and, consequently, his subtle critic of Emmanuel Levinas’ position: Not only goodness and, thus, ethics have to be considered before the subject, but – together with ethics – its violation, i.e. war (2). If the pre-ethical origin of ethics is per se indifferent, then all ethics lies in the interpretation of difference that can also be found in the pre-ethical origin (3).

collection of essays De la grammatology -Of Grammatology3 (1967) creating a relation between truth and voice, a relation which realizes and acknowledges truth as present.
"All the metaphysical determinations of truth ... are more or less immediately inseparable from the instance of the logos ... Within this logos, the original and essential link to the phonè has never been broken." 4errida criticizes an idea of the subject, which is concentrated on consciousness and is constituted from voice: "The voice is consciousness." 5 Here the subject is conceived as thinking itself presently, 6 because while thinking it can hear itself speak with its own voice: "The system of 'bearing (understanding)-oneself-speak'" 7 .Derrida criticizes this kind of logo-and phonocentrism and explains that all self-presence of the subject is characterized by the possibility of non-presence, because every subject is mortal. 8According to Derrida one only grasps the right notion of subjectivity when not reducing it to the presence of consciousness, but at the same time acknowledges the not-presence of the subjection unto time.In Grammatology Derrida speaks out for all that has been suppressed and marginalised and develops the science of writing against the precedence of the voice: The former stands for all that is left out during the process of thinking, which is suppressed, which is not or cannot be brought o consciousness.While doing so, Derrida hints at the fact that even voice and especially consciousness cannot exist absolutely, but are both founded on a material basis.
Together with the phonocentrism, Derrida criticizes the marginalisation of the individualizing difference.A subject which can hear itself speak while thinking constructs time-transcendent ideal notions and assorts things, that appear to itself, to those notions.This assorting is relatively vague which leads to a loss of details of the things, which have appeared to the subject.Thus, those details are not realised.Time-transcendent ideal notions allow the subject to think the same thought every time and in every place and to be able to repeat the same."Ideality is the salvation or the mastery of presence in repetition.  --------------------------------------------It is only a matter of being consequent if Derrida does not only reject the ideality of thoughts, but at the same time poses a "task to think about" to classical metaphysics, which cannot solve this task within its own frame of thinking.
In a very far-fetching argument with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Derrida goes even one step further: He does not only criticize Rousseau's notion of nature because it is an ideal notion, but most of all because it is a culturally defined term.In a culturally agreed act a supplement is put in the place of the meant notion and this supplement is conceived as being the "real one" afterwards. 10Derrida criticizes this act of suppressing, substituting, supplementing and again speaks out for all that has been degraded as secondary: Writing and voice fulfil the same function of representation without either of them being less important than the other. 11However, Derrida prefers the "metaphor" of writing or arche-writing: Due to their non-presence in the written word and their materiality, writing or arche-writing allow for an escape from the never-ending connection of reference between (idealised) supplement to supplement.Since Derrida cannot find any outside of text in Rousseau's work, 12 he himself tries to think différance by means of arche-writing and trace. 13This différance does neither consider the supplement as the real meaning nor does it causally conclude back to a time-transcendent ideal.From this point of view, Derrida (though he himself might well deny it) wants to acknowledge the need for transcendental philosophy, i.e. its way of reasoning and finding arguments, without being able to define transcendentals themselves on the basis of thinking -all this acknowledgement being an act of postmetaphysical metaphysics. 14

Violence and metaphysics (Emmanuel Levinas)
In his outstandingly prudent essay Violence et méthaphysique -Violence and metaphysics 15 Derrida has early dealt with the until then published work of Emmanuel Levinas, a fact which has not missed its effect on the latter.Both thinkers were ex- --------------------------------------------changing their ideas during their lifetime (and beyond). 16Derrida's influence on Levinas is notable, e.g. in the different style of writing of Totalité et Infini -Totality and Infinity and Autrement qu'être -Otherwise than Being. 17In ever new approaches in Violence and Metaphysics Derrida defends Georg F. W. Hegel and Edmund Husserl as representatives of Greek philosophy against the Jewish Emmanuel Levinas' and his critic on his phenomenological teachers. 18It corresponds to the practice of deconstruction to take Levinas' writings in the reconstruction very seriously, 19 which will become explicit in the third part of this essay.The most interesting point of the here mentioned question is, whether ethics or ontology, i.e. metaphysics are to be considered as the first science and where violence has its origin.
Levinas commits the crime of "parricide"20 and imputes thinking recognition as a possessive act to Husserl, which would make it impossible to virtually realize the otherness of the other."The imperialism Metaphysics of theoria already bothered Levinas."21Levinas confronts this possessive act of recognition with the resistance of the other, who is not willing to be possessed by anyone, but rather means evpe,keina th/j ouvsi,aj -from beyond being.As Levinas speaks out against taking possession of the other and making him uniform in the act of cognition, Derrida detects "metaphysics of separation"22 in his work,23 from which originates radical criticism: "Incapable of re- --------------------------------------------specting the Being and meaning of the other, phenomenology and ontology would be philosophies of violence."24Thus, Levinas advocates for ethics and no longer for ontology to be considered as the first science,25 in order to fight against taking possession of the other by the (recognizing) ego.In this process, the other questions the ego, which means for Levinas that "interrogation … [is] the only incarnated nonviolence." 26errida again hints at the problem, that the recognition of the otherness of the other in Levinas' work only represents a shift of the problem.To be able think the otherness of the other, Levinas has to suppress the difference between the ego and the self."The ego is the same.The alterity or negativity interior to the ego, the interior difference, is but an appearance: an illusion". 27Levinas has no option left to maintain this difference in the subject; he can only think a difference between the ego and the other; the other, thus, standing into the ego, where there is the only place where the other can be conceived as a point of difference. 28First of all, the ego itself is indifferentiated and unsplitted.Since the ego in itself shows no difference without the strange other, Levinas according to Derrida has the problem, that the ego cannot delimit itself against the other29 and is confronted with him immediately. 30The ego cannot defend itself against the other, so to speak, it is absolutely exposed to the other,31 in such a way that the other is very close to the ego and yet absolutely different and separated.Through this, the other is the condition of the possibility for, both, murder and loving care: "Only a face can arrest violence, but can do so, in the first place, only because a face can provoke it." 32Since "[t]he ethical relation is a religious relation" (96), Derrida has to re- --------------------------------------------proach Levinas with something unacceptable: "God, therefore, is implicated in war."(107) 33 In the third part of his essay (106-153) Derrida, on his part, tries to get beyond Levinas together with Levinas by taking three steps: For doing so, he first deals with linguistics and, thus, with the human mind's subjection to tradition (106-118); after that, he tackles the logic of reasoning and the possibility of ethics (118-134), before thinking about new ways of a renewed ontology together with Heidegger (134-153).Which detail of these three steps is of importance for the question of the origin of violence and the possibility of ethics?
1. To begin with, Derrida makes it clear that there is no other language than the one we think and speak in.We have to utilize the given way of thinking and speaking and can only get beyond them together with themselves, but never without them. 34t the same time, there does not exist any other possibility than the linguistic discourse to fight for peace in a relatively non-violent way (116-118), since for Levinas face and language are of the same origin and, therefore, for Derrida the confrontation with the other is always characterized by violence. 35Due to the fact that discourse is a spoken one, Derrida assumes (also in delineation of Levinas) 36 , that there is a (transcendental) pre-knowledge about the meaning of war and peace. 37. Concerning possible ethics Derrida sees the problem in Levinas' thoughts in the latter's favor for an absolute asymmetry between the ego and the other, which leads to - ------------------------------------------ 34 E.g.Derrida, Writing, 113.Critchley, Ethics (1992), 14: "In 'Violence and Metaphysics', Of Grammatology, and throughout his work, Derrida is trying to explicate certain necessities within discourse which all philosophers, Levinas and Derrida included, are obliged to face.The questions that Derrida addresses to Levinas, then, are questions that address the whole field of philosophical language, within whose parameters the discourse of deconstruction is also inscribed." 35 Wyschogrod, Edith, Emmanuel Levinas.The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics, The Hague 1974, 211f: "What is critical is that there is not first the face, then language, but a simultaneous upsurge of face, language and responsibility.Language wells up with the face.Yet, in its very appearing, the face undergoes a primordial act of violence." 36 Atterton, Peter, Levinas and the Language of Peace: A Response to Derrida, in: Philosophy Today 36 (1992) 59-70, 60: "The apparent overriding force behind his argument rests with Levinas´ claim that thought is language, that 'thought consists in speaking' (TI40/Ti10).Derrida repeatedly draws on this claim …, since the question for ethics then becomes how both to think and not think about the Other, how to have any relation with someone (peace) which isn´t mediated by reflection on her or him and ex hypothesi language (violence)." 37Derrida, Writing, 121: "Not only nominal definitions but, before them, possibilities of essence which guide all concepts, are presupposed when one speaks of ethics, of transcendence, of infinity, etc.These expressions must have a meaning for concrete consciousness in general, or no discourse and no thought would be possible … Transcendental neutralization is in principle, by its meaning, foreign to all factuality, all existence in general.In fact it is neither before nor after ethics."https://doi.org/10.5771/9783896658074-52,am 18.09.2023,00:39:41 Open Access --http://www.nomos-elibrary.de/agb the fact, that the other must never (as in Husserl) be conceived of as alter ego. 38Derrida, though, has to grant that it might be an act of violence to make the other an object by the intentional act of recognition.However, he asks to consider that this is unavoidable, because language is only possible if the other confronts the ego.According to Derrida one has, thus, to assume "an original, transcendental violence, previous to every ethical choice, even supposed by ethical nonviolence.Is it meaningful to speak of a pre-ethical violence?If the transcendental 'violence' to which we allude is tied to phenomenality itself, and to the possibility of language, it then would be embedded in the root of meaning and logos, before the latter had to be determined as rhetoric, psychagogy, demagogy, etc." 39 If language exists and if there is an outside, so if things and other human beings appear to man and confront him, then there necessarily is 'violence' -'violence' is printed in inverted commas, because it need not obligatorily be the case of physical violence.However, both the recognition of another human being as other and speaking to the other are acts of violence, according to Derrida, because they pull both the ego and the other out of their solipsism and make them focus on the other.As a consequence, there is no non-violent existence: "War, therefore, is congenital to phenomenality, is the very emergence of speech and of appearing." 40t the same time, the other must be -against Levinas and with Husserl -a different ego, he must be alter ego."To refuse to see in it an ego in this sense is, within the ethical order, the very gesture of all violence.If the other was not recognized as ego, its entire alterity would collapse." 41Before any dissymmetry there has to exist a symmetry between the ego and the alter ego.Here, however, the "other as other" must not be reduced to the ego, since he, as mentioned before, is an alter ego."The egoity of the other permits him to say 'ego' as I do; and this is why he is Other, and not a stone". 42errida summarizes the above explained ideas -the other is an other ego; if there is an ego, there must exist violence -under the term "economy" 43 and by doing so, Derrida, maybe absolutely contrary to Levinas, gets to another starting point for ethics.If violence is necessarily implicated in the factual existence of the subject, then it is only within ethics that the subject can face the other in a peaceful gesture.This facing of the other is economic, that is never transcendental or "absolutely peaceful" 44 , because it depends on the pre-ethical violence and follows the same.Derrida wishes for a pre-pre-ethical non-violence, he realizes, however, that factual existence has an opposition between the ego and the other in store, which cannot be evaded and, therefore, has to be characterized as pre-ethical or transcendental.Besides, he -in a rather skeptical or culturally pessimistic gesture -regards the facing of the other under the linguistic --------------------------------------------conditions of the existent world (which have been explained in the first step) as the way of least use of violence: "Discourse, therefore, if it is originally violent, can only do itself violence, can only negate itself in order to affirm itself, make war upon the war which institutes it without ever being able to reappropriate this negativity, to the extent that it is discourse.… This secondary war, as the avowal of violence, is the least possible violence, the only war to repress the worst violence". 45. The last step is dedicated to the rehabilitation of ontology. 46Derrida points out that there is no absolute being, which can be conceived of as independent from the existent. 47Consequently, there can be no ethics that does not include the thinking of the being, 48 because every ethics is based upon the recognition of the other. 49It is of great importance to Derrida, that the being is not of higher value than the existent, since it can only exist in it and through it, which leads to the linguistic character of the being and to the fact, that language and thinking are only possible within the framework of the being. 50Since Levinas, however, postulates "the difference between Being and the existent", but "at the same time as it stifles it" 51 , his thinking is based on a difference he cannot assess: "War, perhaps, is no longer even conceivable as negativity." 52hat can we conclude from this passage through the essay Violence and Metaphysics?subject of recognition.At the same time, however, he realizes that the occidental thinking is marked by structures which are not reflected upon by the same, but which are to the core characteristic of it.One of these suppressed structures is the opposition between primary language and secondary writing.It is in analogy to this opposition that the separation of culture and nature works, in which the natural state is a cultural fiction without any real existence.Derrida carves this out in the treatment of Rousseau, after having made clear by an intense lecture of a small chapter in Tristes tropiques by Lévi-Strauss that Derrida confronts himself with the risks of the term of writing.Lévi-Strauss assumes that writing is the origin of violence and is essentially made for the oppression and exploitation of man.When Derrida deals with this reproach he makes clear that he -contrary to the positions criticized by himself -does not suppress or exclude what first seems to contradict his own train of thoughts.So, after having advocated for a preference of writing over voice in the first part of grammatology, Derrida begins the second part of his book by pointing out the risks of the conventionally secondary term of writing with Lévi-Strauss, which -according to Derrida -leads to the necessity of the development of a new writing-term, which does not pass on the metaphysical hierarchy of the spoken word over the merely representing writing of the same.A real science of writing has to be aware of the fact, that this science itself -by an act of newly arranged hierarchy -is not simply the solution to all problems, but that it bears risks if applied too superficially.These risks have to be discovered and made transparent to avoid their making mischief in the mode of suppressed things in the underground.
Lévi-Strauss reflects about the system of exploitation of writing, because the chief of his Nambikwara-tribe behaved in an important scene as if he was as knowledgeable in writing as the ethnographer often to be seen with his notebooks.Lévi-Strauss interprets this scene by means of Marxist theory 57 as "man´s exploitation by man" 58 , while critically analyzing his own role as an ethnographer and arguing again in a naive way.The ethnographer feels guilty for having brought writing and, thus, "aggression coming from without" 59 and he dreams of the "purity of an innocent language" 60 of 'animally satisfied' primitive people up to his arrival. 61In a complicated lecture of Tristes tropiques and its predecessors Derrida states clearly, that though the Nambikwara have not been able to write in the traditional sense of the word, they have made distinctions which have to be interpreted in a mode of writing.It was, e.g. a tradition among them --------------------------------------------to not pronounce names.Since a young girl wanted to take revenge on a playmate, the ethnographer still learnt of a name for the first time and from this time on it wasaccording to his own account (despite of pricks of conscience) 62 -very easy to play the children off against each other and to find out about their actually secret names.Derrida interprets the possibility of giving out or keeping silent about names as an analogon of writing, 63 because writing is violent in that way that it makes it impossible to differentiate between naming and calling due to its lack of context: 64 "This last violence is all the more complex in its structure because it refers at the same time to the two inferior levels of arche-violence and of law.In effect, it reveals the first nomination which was already an expropriation, but it denudes also that which since then functioned as the proper, the so-called proper, substitute of the deferred proper, perceived by the social and moral consciousness as the proper, the reassuring seal of self-identity, the secret." 65rom these thought it becomes evident that Derrida demonstrates to Lévi-Strauss with the latter's own ethnographical material, that the Nambikwara were no non-violent primitive people which have later been culturally alienated by writing introduced by the ethnographer and have consequently become violent.Hence, Derrida explains the inconsistency of Lévi-Strauss' argumentation and rejects both, his differentiation between culture and nature and their Marxist interpretation.For himself Derrida concludes from his treatment of Lévi-Strauss, that even the pre-ethical sphere of the arche-writing is violent, since already here there shows a difference which later affects ethics itself.However, ethics can only be fully justified if one stays aware of the pre-ethical violence and does not suppress it, because otherwise every mode of justification would be based on opaque axioms.
"In other words, if writing is to be related to violence, writing appears well before writing in the narrow sense; already in the difference or the arche-writing that opens speech itself." 66y means of these reflections, Derrida saves his new science of writing, which opposes phono-and logocentrism from the same naivety that he reproaches Lévi-Strauss and Rousseau for with regard to their concept of nature and violence.cal violence.At the close of the depiction of Derrida's position, three further ideas are to show to what extent those considerations can be productive to think ahead.
1. Man cannot steal away from his responsibility: He has to take over responsibility and he cannot hold anyone else accountable for rules and laws.In that sense, one also has to relativize laws recognized in religions.Furthermore, these laws have to be examined regarding their universal validity: Do they have to or can they be valid for all man?
2. If ethics is the interpretation with sole responsibility of that which lies before man in the mode of difference and which remains hidden, then human rights are contingent in their concrete wording, but not disputable in their general justifiability.Thus, there is -according to Derrida -no time-transcendent nature of man, but every single man is so much a unique individual that he has the right to live -maybe even the duty.Ethics, therefore, is the necessary reaction of man to his precarious existence, in which he has to act and to behave towards himself.Consequently, there is a possibility to negotiate about the specific rights in discourse without the possibility of doing away with discourse itself.If, however, there is no alternative to discourse, then there exists a not inconsiderable guideline with regards to the content of human rights, since these must not stand against the enabling of discourse, but, what is more, have to enable all man to potentially participate in that discourse.
3. The differentiation between pre-ethicak violence and the absolute Other, that is the absolute Transcendent, who is addressed as God in biblical tradition, this differentiation could be helpful to purify the experience of God.In a first reflex, believers attribute to God to both hurt and heal (cp.Hos 6,1).At this point of paradox-precarious experience of God it might be necessary to differentiate between pre-ethical conditions of existence of human life and the otherworldly God.Human life is -especially with its confinement to death -characterized by an obvious ambiguity, which in Christianbiblical hope, firstly, is embraced by the benevolent goodness of the Creator (Gen 1), secondly, has a guideline for contemporary daily life in Gods commandments (Deut 4) and, thirdly, does not recognize death as the end of God's love to his creatures (1Cor 15).