Derrida\'s Philopolemology

For a more extensive discussion, see my Philosophy After Friendship: Deleuze's Conceptual Personae (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, 116.
See also Leo Strauss, ''Notes on Schmitt: The Concept of the Political'' in Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 108-117.
Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 46.
Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, 116
Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, 114
Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 29
Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, 246.
The first two meditations, Geschlecht 1 & 2, are collected in the French edition of De l'esprit (1990), 147-222.
Derrida, "Heidegger's Ear," 165ff.
Derrida, "Heidegger's Ear," 163.
Derrida, De l'esprit, 11—my translation.
Derrida, "Heidegger's Ear," 166.
Derrida, "Heidegger's Ear," 165.
Derrida, "Heidegger's Ear," 165.
Derrida, "Heidegger's Ear," 175.
Derrida, "Heidegger's Ear," 173.
Derrida, "Heidegger's Ear," 176—translation modified.
Derrida, "Heidegger's Ear," 178.
Derrida, "Heidegger's Ear," 178.
Derrida, "Heidegger's Ear," 178.
Derrida, "Heidegger's Ear," 202.
Derrida, "Heidegger's Ear," 200-201.
Heidegger, quoted in Derrida, "Heidegger's Ear," 197.
Derrida, "Heidegger's Ear," 197.
Derrida, "Heidegger's Ear," 197.
Derrida, "Heidegger's Ear," 197.
Derrida, "Heidegger's Ear," 197.
Derrida, "Heidegger's Ear," 197.

Gregg Lambert, Syracuse University, U.S.A./Western Sydney University, Australia

Derrida's "Philopolemology"

In recent political philosophy, especially in the tradition of continental philosophy that has been influenced by the thought of Nietzsche and Marx, we have witnessed a critical overturning of an earlier philosophical idealism that invoked friendship as the destination of the political and, in its place, of what I will call a non-philosophical understanding that has determined a certain war (pólemos), and the "friend-enemy" relation, as the permanent ground from which any critical or strategic understanding of the political must now depart. This tendency can most clearly be illustrated by many of the commentaries that have circulated around the figures of the German jurist Karl Schmitt and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, particularly those by Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida. Since I have discussed the philosophy of Agamben elsewhere, in this article I will address Derrida's overt polemic and/or Auseinandersetzung with these two thinkers in his later writings. First, I will discuss his polemic with Schmitt from The Politics of Friendship (1990), and will conclude with some preliminary remarks on the culmination of this polemic in his reflections on Heidegger from the same period.

Derrida vs. Schmitt

In The Concept of the Political (1932), Schmitt focuses almost exclusively on what he calls "the concrete situations" of the determination of the enemy relationship in order to arrive at what he claims to be a pure concept of the political as being first of all, founded upon the need to determine the friend-enemy distinction as a point of certainty that structures the social field. In his reading of Schmitt, which I will return to in greater detail below, Derrida determines the character of this certainty as not an epistemological certainty, but rather a practical certainty (praxis), which is why Schmitt calls it a "concrete situation" referring the nature of the knowledge to the subject who knows, who is capable of acting and in this case, referring to one who capable of knowing and acting upon "who is the enemy?" and "who is the friend?" from among all social relationships in which the subject is situated. As Derrida writes:
If the political exists [in Schmitt's sense], one must know who everyone is, who is a friend and who is an enemy, and this knowing is not a mode of theoretical knowledge but one of practical identification: knowing consists in knowing how to identify the friend and the enemy.
As the passage illustrates, the recognition of "who is enemy?" becomes an acute political problem, in some ways lending credence to Schmitt's earlier argument that the polemical character that determines the concept of the political in a non-philosophical manner, that is, as a pragmatic or concrete situation of alliances in the situation of warfare. Of course, this development must be understood in the context of the changing modern conception of war itself as a form of conflict that exceeds the earlier boundaries of nation and territory and, by the end of the 19th century (echoing Foucault's biopolitical thesis), enlists entire populations, international classes, as well as "races" in a generalized strategy of security.
As Leo Strauss has already observed in his epilogue to the 1976 re-edition of The Concept of the Political, one of the distinctive characteristics that he finds in Schmitt's analysis of the political is that, unlike other regions of culture and society, the political has no sphere of its own. In other words, the friend-enemy grouping can be found in other spheres and regions of "Culture" (Civil Society) such as the religious, the economic, legal, scientific and the ethical. However, it is only the political that names the point of actuality and "concrete determination" of a particular friend-enemy grouping at a given historical moment. Religious conflicts can intensify within or between societies, but they become political only to the extent that they threaten to become actualized as lethal conflicts, empowering each side with the power to kill or to sacrifice the members of their own association. Although it would seem that Schmitt is founding the political on actuality of war--a thesis that is more in keeping with that of Foucault--he reminds us many times that it is not the actuality of war that proves to be most decisive in determining the political, but rather a purely virtual decision which lies at the basis (or the ground) of the "right to kill," even though this ground will have no grounds of its own, and will hang suspended and in abeyance, as if waiting to be justified or legally sanctioned by the order of the sovereign. For example, in a post 9/11 world, it might serve to outline the archaic imperial grounds of the various appeals made by the Bush administration to jus belli against an "enemy" who has decisively demonstrated "the readiness to die and to unhesitatingly kill its enemies". Ironically, as in Agamben's application of Schmitt to the contemporary appeals to sovereign power, if the concept of the political can be understood to appear in its purest and most threadbare sense in the current "war on terror," it is because any moral sense of evaluation (i.e., "just war") must be assumed to already express a polemical or oppositional meaning and cannot be employed theoretically or scientifically to grasp the truth of the situation.
It is around this critical point that we now turn to Derrida's relentless attack on Schmitt's purity of the concept of the political, especially his deconstruction of all of Schmitt's claims to purify the term politics from every weakened, mixed, abstract and metaphorical sense (economic, religious, aesthetic, even moral). In the several commentaries on Schmitt in The Politics of Friendship, Derrida argues that these claims are to be founded on an impure presupposition (if not prejudice) of "the political as such" in a Platonic sense. As Derrida writes: "He [Schmitt] would wish--it is his Platonic dream--that this 'as such' should remain pure at the very spot where it is contaminated." Recalling a crucial passage from Plato's Republic upon which Schmitt heavily relies for this distinction, Derrida alludes to the long tradition of historical scholarship on this passage to show that Plato is here himself engaged in a polemic or diatribe, one which seeks to remove "the political as such" from the possibility of "civil war." Yet, as Derrida rightly observes; "the purity of the distinction between stásis and pólemos remains in the Republic a paradigm, accessible only to discourse." As Schmitt himself acknowledges in a note on the passage, "civil war is only a self-laceration and does not signify perhaps that a new state or people is being created." This conceptual distinction, however, is only accessible through the metaphors that that Plato employs to establish the difference between "killing the enemy" and "self-laceration." In other words, for Plato civil war was tantamount to an act of misrecognition or misidentification in which one thinks one is aiming at an enemy only to shoot oneself instead.
In politics, as in war, the problem of "friendly fire" is a real threat and thus it is crucial to know "who the enemy is" and practically "how to recognize the other who is the enemy," that is, to avoid mistaking the enemy for oneself (or one's friend). To assist in this process of identification, Plato employs the analogy of the Barbarian or the Persian ("one who is an enemy by nature"), in order to orientate this distinction outward in an appropriate direction, away from the polis, toward the outside; but also metaphorically or poetically, away from one's own body or the body-proper of the people itself and towards the foreign body of the hostis. In other words, Plato employs the paradigm of "Barbarian vs. Hellene" to assist his Greek audience in conceptually orienting this distinction between proper and improper identification, even though at the same time he will then worry about the metaphorical properties of this analogy when applied to antagonisms internal to the polis. Returning to Schmitt's use of this identification, and for the mechanism of identification at the basis of the political decision of "who is the enemy?" how can this purely political determination be made on the basis of an analogy to one "who is the natural enemy?" which is to say, on the basis of an impure, pre-political determination? Race would only be one concept that has emerged in the modern and colonial world on the basis of this analogy, perhaps in order to orient social antagonisms towards a foreign body, but others no less problematic have preceded it. In fact, we know that the entire history of the concept of the political is plagued by the inappropriate, or metaphorical, uses of this analogy, especially in the politico-strategic uses of "the natural enemy" up to and including the strategic use deployed by Marx and Engels when they identify the bourgeoisie as the natural enemy of the proletariat. Perhaps this is enough to throw into sharp relief Derrida's criticism of Schmitt's constant claim to purify the concept of the political from all abstractions (by which he means of all weak analogies), and the friend-enemy concepts from all metaphoric and symbolic appropriations, especially when the concept of the enemy has been found to be "impure" from the beginning, a bastard concept.
This is the very problem that Derrida invokes in the passage from the chapter "In Human Language, Fraternity," where he asks, "If a politics of friendship rather than war were to be derived, there would have to be agreement on the meaning of 'friend.' If the signification of "friend" can only be determined from within the friend/enemy opposition, then what Derrida is calling our attention to here is whether the "concrete situation" of friendship may also be fated to remain a pure abstraction within a system—linguistic, juridical, political and social--that is ordered by a nearly unanimous or univocal agreement concerning "who is the enemy" (der Feind). And yet, this abstraction is not caused by the fact that friendship suffers from a lack of signification, but rather from too many significations determined as individualistic, subjective, intuitive, cultural, probabilistic, spontaneous, and unconscious. Consequently, for Schmitt, the usefulness of the enemy concept is that the literalness of its signification produces the concreteness of the political relation, according to which all other social and cultural oppositions are subordinated. The enemy would thus be the name of a social existence reduced to its barest and most "savage" sense, bereft of all other social relations, as well as all forms of dependency and hospitality; a being who is either condemned to death, to nothingness, or to wandering outside the limits of the polis.

Derrida vs. Heidegger

At this point, I will veer away from Schmitt's friend-enemy grouping to Derrida's late writings on Heidegger's concept of friend (and enemy), on peace and war (polemos), which is gathered under the neologism "philopolemology." It belongs to a series of meditations on Heidegger and the question, beginning in the 1980's, under the German term "Geschlecht" (a term that could mean kind, species, race, and even sex). The passages I will comment on are from the fourth and final installment from the 1990's under the subtitle "Heidegger's Ear." Before turning to read the question of the friend and the enemy from this last meditation, what is most remarkable to observe is that over a period of twenty years Derrida patiently and painstakingly performs a tortuous and often self-inflicted Auseinandersetzung with Heidegger's philosophy. This last term, which Heidegger himself employs to translate the Greek polemos, must be understood in two different senses: first, according to a polemical sense meaning opposition, struggle, conflict, even war; second, in a topological sense of setting apart two contrary positions within the same philosophy, or corpus, thus marking a division and distribution (partage) of the different senses of Geschlecht that closely touch upon the concepts of race, sex, kind and/or species.
Consequently, the first mediation is aptly subtitled, "Ontological Difference and Sexual Difference," and addresses the elision of sexual difference in Heidegger's thought; the second, "Heidegger's Hand," addresses the distinction of human and animal and the implicit coupling of the voice and the hand in the definition of the human. Of course, the third meditation, De l'esprit (1987), addresses the question of the concept of spirit in Heidegger's philosophy, but also implicitly or cryptically, the question of Heidegger's silence concerning the holocaust in the post-war writings. However, I would argue that it is in the final meditation, subtitled "Heidegger's Ear," that we witness Derrida's most explicit, and perhaps unforgiving, criticisms of Heidegger's own deafness to the association of his own voice and the official language of National Socialist ideology, especially in the years 1933-1935 after the period of his Rectorship. It is here we have the most vivid and dramatic example of an Auseinandersetzung that takes place precisely around the question of the friend-enemy distinction, which, during the pre-war years, Derrida will suspect as harboring a close alliance with the thought of Schmitt, and; after the war, will be surrounded by an air of secrecy and silence, as if marking the repression of its original polemical meaning under the mythical name of friendship, which reappears "like the distant voice of an old friend."
To begin, we might ask how it is possible that the voice of an enemy could be mistaken for the original voice of the friend? That is, for φιλοσοφία? Even more threatening is the question of whether the silence of this supposed "friend" could still harbor a secret complicity and collusion with a known enemy, the revelation of which grows with each new scandal and thus continues to haunt the future of philosophy itself. These are the questions that lurk in the background of Derrida's opening lines:
The friend is silent. This friend. Keeps silent. Here, at least, this friend says nothing. One could nearly conclude from this, from then on, that this friend utters nothing determinable: Heidegger evokes nothing said by or no saying, however friendly, of the friend. The voice of this friend does not necessarily speak. This friend could be aphasic.
But why silence? What is silence in this context? First, recalling the third meditation on Geschlecht, De l'esprit (1987), it primarily concerns the "question" of Heidegger's silence after the war regarding the extermination of the Jewish populations under National Socialism. Therefore, silence is already interpreted as an act of avoidance, but also, as the technical way Heidegger chooses to avoid certain terms or themes in his manner of philosophical commentary, beginning with Zein und Zeit (1927). Thus, "He admonishes (avertit): we have to get around (vermeiden) a certain number of terms. Among them, Spirit (Geist)." In heeding this early gesture of avoidance, Derrida will add several other terms that he finds throughout Heidegger's philosophy, all of which can be gathered under the umbrella term of Geshlecht—i.e, sex, race, species, etc. Of course, it is not the case that Heidegger chose to avoid these terms altogether, but only that he chose to avoid addressing them according to their own terms; therefore, his manner of avoiding (that is, his manner of keeping silent before the word) was bound up with the technical performance of "placing under erasure" (kreuzweise Durchstreichung) the term's ontic meaning in favor of its ontological determination. In a certain sense, this technical and phenomenological procedure is not unrelated to Schmitt's pretention to "purify" the concept of the political precisely through the avoidance of a number of other ontic significations that determine its meaning. Is Heidegger's gesture, therefore, also related to what Derrida criticizes as a "Platonic dream"?
But what does this technical gesture of avoidance (the act of crossing out as the manner of keeping silent in the very act of saying, and thus, also the manner not being responsible to or for the word's ontic meaning) have to do with the moral or ethical question of Heidegger's silence concerning the holocaust, first of all, but also concerning his own involvement with the National Socialist party during the years of 1933-1935? This will be Derrida's question concerning Heidegger's silence, which directly implicates Derrida's own philosophy in this silence as well—in the sense of making Derrida himself responsible for this silence, and the ethical demand or obligation of responding to what this silence avoids—in as much as Heidegger's own silence is translated (i.e,. carried across) by Derrida, who also, in a certain sense, has no choice but to "bear" responsibility for it.
As Derrida asks in the fourth meditation, "what does "to carry" (tragen, porter, bear) mean in this case?" Here, we should remember that, poetically, the figure of the "voice of the friend" is the classical topos for "voice of moral conscience." (One carries the voice of moral conscience internal to oneself, which speaks to the Ego or the Self as a friend.) What does it mean, therefore, as Derrida claims, that this "friend is silent," or "this friend keeps silent" --and not just after the war, but very early on, if not from the very beginning, in Zein und Zeit, where the voice of the friend is evoked, but is already found to be silent? As Derrida goes on to observe: "The friend, then, seems named once in Sein und Zeit, but keeps silent even if its voice is evoked. The friend does not appear, has the visibility of no determined figure or face, has no subjective, personal, sexual status; one cannot even decide if the friend is living or dead." Finally, he concludes from these observations: "One then can hardly say that the friend is named by Heidegger in Sein und Zeit. I prefer to say that the friend is only evoked." After giving very lengthy exegesis on both the German (Heideggerian) and Greek (Aristotelian) determinations of what it is to "carry" (tragen) the voice of the friend, he underlines the fact that both voice and logos is later denied to the animal along with the possibilities of friendship, since the "animal has no friend, no possibility of friendship, being poor in world." Therefore, Derrida must again conclude that Heidegger never speaks of friendship, of the concept or the general essence of friendship, as in the Aristotelian phrase "Oh my friends, there is no friend," but rather of a singular voice ("a partial object, perhaps a psychoanalyst would say") that opens the ears of Dasein.
But why is this so significant, that is, why does Derrida tarry over such a singular and it would seem minor evocation of the concept of friend in Heidegger's earlier work? In answering this question, let us return now to the above statement concerning the proximity of Heidegger and Schmitt that will emerge five years later when they exchanged correspondences, as well as what Derrida's discernment of the presence of Hegel as the secret mediator of this affiliation—especially regarding the character of a certain "historical decision" that will determine the nature of the "natural community," or the German people (Volk). In the following passage, especially, this proximity is given a particularly decisive character, which earlier I alluded to under the more martial term of an "alliance" that, moreover, is situated around the German term Kampf (conflict, struggle). Consequently, Derrida writes, "if one still goes no further than Sein und Zeit, one can say that there is neither opposition nor contradiction drawn up between what is said concerning the voice of the friend as an exemplar of Mitsein (being in common) and what is said later about struggle (combat, Kampf) as the essential form of community (Gemeinschaft), as well as of the people (Volk).
If the voice of the friend, and then the reference to the friend, is as essential to Dasein's own-proper-being qua Mitsein as are the community, the people, and struggle (Kampf), it is no doubt logical to conclude from this that there is no friend that is not itself Dasein responding in return to the same description and the same conditions: no friend outside of the possibility of speaking, hearing oneself speaking [s'entendre parler], of entering the Miteinander of Auseinandersetzung, that is to say, no friend outside of belonging to a community and to a people (Volk).
At the same time, as Derrida also concludes, "although it is not entirely excluded, neither is it absolutely certain that belonging to the same community or to the same people, the experience of the same tongue, or the participation in the same struggle is the requisite condition for a voice of the friend to be carried by Dasein."
Nevertheless, we must recall the above statement regarding the character of a coming "historical decision" that may, in fact, provide this certainty concerning the destiny of the German people. It is at this moment, that is, around 1935, we finally come to the announcement of war (pólemos), but also concerning the essential relation between friend and enemy. In other words, for Heidegger, as for Schmitt, the voice of the friend does not exclude opposition, and there is no essential opposition between phília and Kampf or, as he will say later, pólemos. In fact, where Heidegger and Schmitt seem to be in such proximity, if not in complete agreement at this moment, concerns precisely the dual nature of struggle and alliance, or the identity of the enemy and the friend; therefore, what is most decisive about this couple that is not merely opposition (as Heidegger will always cross out or "strike though" the character of opposition qua opposition), but rather primordially "the gathering of forces that will become decisive for any community on the earth." In other words, in the gathering power of logos, which Heidegger identified with the power of pólemos in the seminar on Heraclitus, there will always already be this duality, in which opposition is secondary or the product of a primary decision concerning "a community of struggle" (die Kampfgemeinschaft). As Derrida concludes: "These are propositions at once very close to those of Carl Schmitt [that is, in 1933], but later [in 1955], will be withdrawn in principle from Schmitt's secularized anthropotheology."
Finally, let us turn to the principle fragment from Heraclitus which becomes the critical basis for Heidegger's 1935 Rectorate Discourse: "pólemos and logos are the same" ("πόλεμος und λόγος sind dasselbe"). This will become the statement and the occasion of perhaps the most severe, if not damning, criticism on Derrida's part, but especially because this statement will appear twenty years later, after the war, at which point Heidegger will choose at that moment to substitute the word "friendship" (phília) for "war" (pólemos). In this instance, moreover, we are not dealing with the same technique of crossing through a term's ontic meaning to open the word to a more essential ontological determination, but rather with a substitution of one word with another, term for term, in which the two terms appear to be related by a secondary opposition: friend and enemy, friendship and struggle, peace and war. Thus, Derrida writes,
Twenty years after the Freiburg summer seminar that will give rise to the publication of the Introduction to Metaphysics, this time again, this time already, Heidegger is tuned in again to Heraclitus— to that fragment 53 on pólemos that will have been the subject of the '33 correspondence with Carl Schmitt. And he seems to say the contrary, something that resonates at first hearing something he will say twenty years later.
I cannot hope to parse these sentences in detail, except to point out how contorted and tortuous it is grammatically in its use of future perfect and future past tense ("this time again, this time already," regarding "what will have been the subject of the same correspondence"), but especially the resonance "at first hearing" between the 1933 correspondence with Schmitt and "something he will say twenty years later." Moreover, Derrida will speculate concerning a press release that will take place at some point in the future regarding the news of a certain "Heidegger affair" when the word gets out over this correspondence, a news release that will have involved Derrida personally:
A philosopher or a historian pressed to appear in the press would send a press communique to all the press agencies to put forward his or her last discovery. And one would immediately read in The Nation, Newsweek, The Village Voice, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Le Monde, or Liberation some definitive sentences [by the aforementioned philosopher, that is, Derrida himself]: whereas after the war, in 1955, Heidegger says of logos, that it is friendship itself, in 1935, right in the Nazi period, the author of the Rectorate Discourse, two years after his resignation, declares war again. He says without embarrassing himself about the same logos; that it is not friendship but pólemos. That is, referring to the same logos, he declares war before the war and at the apogee of Nazism. Then after the war and the end of Nazism, he goes on declaring peace, multiplying the declarations of love and friendship, singing unity, the εν πάντα of being that gathers in concord, harmony, and homology, and correspondence. The same press communique would find in this the confirmation, in 1935, of a thought of struggle, of combat (Kampf) that oriented the Rectorate Discourse two years before.
In the quite humorous and telling passages that follow, Derrida will immediately send a telegram to this quasi-fictional press release, that is to say, he will have sent a telegram to himself in response to the announcement of a certain "Heidegger Affair"—and affair that has taken place more than once in the past, and will no doubt take place again in the future—but especially responding to the implication of his own name in the affair, of his own philosophy and its supposed guilt by association or affiliation with the so-called "Nazi-philosopher"; but, most seriously, concerning the misquotations and misunderstandings of the statements he had made to the journalists. "That is not false," he begins to explain, "and I am not saying that this press dispatch would be misled [by what I said] or misleading [concerning the truth of the whole affair]. But it is advisable to decelerate things a bit, if at least one still wants to read and to think what one claims to judge." In other words, Derrida begins to equivocate, as he has always done—or rather, as he has always been heard to do—on such occasions.
Why? To equivocate means nothing less to speak in two or more voices, often multiple voices contrary and opposed, in the same statement or sentence (satz), and concerning the same issue. Thus, on the one hand, one voice says, Heidegger certainly did say these things and this is an undeniable fact. On the other hand, the other voice says, "it is advisable in effect to recall that the word Kampf, any more than the word Führer, lets itself be totally determined in itself … by a context then dominated by a Führer, author of a certain Mein Kampf." On the other hand, we now hear a third voice speak, or perhaps the first voice engaged in a polemic with the second, "but the use of the same words cannot not be contaminated by this irrigation, above all the very moment Heidegger took part in the restructuring of the university in accordance with the "Führerprinzip."
All these multiple and often conflicted and opposing voices speak and carry one another endlessly, since they are all implicated in the same affair, the same philosophy, if not the same philosopher (whether we are referring here to Heidegger or to Derrida). But what is most striking is that Derrida, through his own internal equivocation, becomes the "voice of the friend" that we original found to be totally silent throughout this whole affair, but also remained silent afterwards as well. In short, he performs or enunciates the voice of moral conscience that was not present, if not performing a bit of "Jewish guilt" in the inner-ear of the aforementioned "Nazi philosopher." Would this not recall the scene of ghost pouring his poison into the ear of a certain Prince of Denmark as well?
Nevertheless, to conclude, what I would underline in the above is the problem of equivocation or double meaning itself that is clearly legible, and will permanently leave its stamp on our hearing of the words for friend and enemy in Heidegger's philosophy, which are more closely united perhaps than ever before. In other words, what Heidegger says before the war and what he seems to say afterward, may now gather together (legein) the same silence. Therefore, I will simply conclude with this final question that precedes and introduces the above passages: "if phília and logos are the same in 1955; if pólemos and logos are the same in 1935; are not phília and pólemos, in fact, always the same?"


Works Cited

Derrida, Jacques. Heidegger et la question: De l'esprit et autres essais. Paris: Flammarion, 1990.
____________. "Heidegger's Ear: Philopolemology (Geschelcht IV)" in Reading Heidegger: Commemorations. Ed. John Sallis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
__________. The Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. London: Verso Press, 1997.
Lambert, Gregg. Philosophy After Friendship: Deleuze's Conceptual Personae. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993.