By Gordon Hull
I pass along the following with minimal additional comment, as it fills in a historical detail that I’d not known. It’s from Peter Goodrich, a very prominent critical legal theorist at Cardozo Law School, on “the role that Derrida played at Cardozo, and less expectedly the part played by the Law School in radicalizing Derrida:”
“It was after becoming a Fellow at Cardozo that he shifted to a more political trajectory and engaged with the fight to free Mandela and end apartheid. I think he would have been surprised to learn that Cardozo radicalized him but why not? It was a two-way street, and recollecting the atmosphere and passions that circumambulated 55 Fifth Avenue back then, I think it is fair to say that Drucilla Cornell who was here at the time was a political powerhouse that few could avoid if they walked through the corridors where the faculty live” (603)
The Derrida piece that emerges from the symposium is “Force of Law,” which appeared in the (1990) issue of the Cardozo Law Review to emerge from the symposium. Derrida’s piece revolves around his reading of Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence.” It emphasizes a central point also found in CLS: that law is power. Here is Derrida: “the word “enforceability” reminds us that there is no such thing as law that doesn’t imply in itself, a priori, in the analytic structure of its concept, the possibility of being ‘enforced,’ applied by force” (925)
How we are to understand Derrida as a political writer is of course a big topic; in a late interview, he distinguishes his own work in “deconstruction” from a tradition running from Luther to Heidegger, suggesting that “the ‘deconstruction’ I attempt is not that deconstruction, it’s definitely more ‘political’ too, differently political; but it would take too many words to explain this” (Paper Machine, 115). He elsewhere insists that a “political dimension” was “decipherable in all my texts, even the oldest ones’ (Paper Machine, 152). I’ve tried to argue that this is true for his 1968 “Plato’s Pharmacy,” and that there is a specific politics involved in ratcheting him to phenomenology. Still, it’s hard to miss that his writings from the early 1990s forward are more obviously political than the earlier ones. In any case, these connections can be complex; if American CLS nudged Derrida toward a more direct engagement with politics, that potentiality had to be there in the first place.
Goodrich closes with an anecdote:
“Back in 1987 I was in Eastern Europe, behind the Iron Curtain, in Russian occupied Budapest. I had been invited to lecture but when the Marxist professoriate of Etvos Lorand University Law School met me and discussed my planned lecture, they rapidly realized that this was not a good idea and cancelled the class. Sensible folks. I had a day free and decided to travel to Sopron, a city on the border with Austria where my host had a sister willing to show me round. I took the train and a copy of Jacques Derrida, The Postcard, as my reading. It did not occur to me that I needed a passport to travel inside the country but close to Sopron the police entered the train and asked for ID. My only document was The Postcard, which they scrutinized, discussed and then shaking their heads indicated that it was not enough and arrested me for a while until my host came and vouched for me. When I was next on a panel with Derrida, I told him the story. He paused and pondered for a moment and then said “I am sorry that my book was of no help.” And of course it was useless, but in the best of senses. It gave no comfort to the authorities. It provided no identification of me. It made no demand. And yet I read it on the train, I read it in the police cell. I finished it on my return. Socrates and Freud were comfortingly to hand. At random, though I am fond of quoting it: “In history, this is my hypothesis, epistolary fictions multiply with each new crisis of destination.””
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