Derrida and the Ethics of the Im-possible

2008 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 270-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
François Raffoul
Keyword(s):  
Moral Decision ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility ◽  
The Law

AbstractDerrida often insists that ethics must be the experience and encounter of a certain impossible. A proposition all the more troubling, as it is proposed by Derrida in the context of a return precisely to the conditions of possibility of ethics. It will appear that returning to the possibilities of ethics implies a return to its limits, to its aporias, which are both constitutive and incapacitating, possibilizing and impossibilizing. The purpose of this paper is to begin exploring this aporetic structure of ethics and to identify how it is tied to the impossible. I will pursue this inquiry by reconstituting how Derrida appropriates Heidegger's expression of "possibility of the impossible," and by reconstituting the aporias of the law, of moral decision, of responsibility, and of an ethics of hospitality as welcome of the event of otherness.

scholarly journals Uncertain Credit: Melville's Affective Economies

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Alistair Murray
Keyword(s):  
Literary Texts ◽  
Legal Authority ◽  
Confidence Man ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility ◽  
Contractual Relations ◽  
The Law ◽  
Benito Cereno

<p>Despite taking place in putatively “lawless” settings, Melville’s maritime fiction maps complex economies of obligation: characters draw up contracts, extend credit, and broker promissory exchanges for goods among themselves, in spite of the absence of any state or legal authority which would enforce their agreements and thereby guarantee the speculative values they call into being. Instead of being underwritten by the law, these contractual relations are characterised by their affective conditions of possibility. In these works, transacting business with strangers in mobile and itinerant spaces requires characters to develop ways of reading the character and creditworthiness of others in order to suppress suspicion and install confidence in its place. Taking “Benito Cereno” (1855) and The Confidence-Man (1857) as its key texts, this thesis tracks these economies of obligation as they emerge in and around Melville’s maritime fictions, which solicit the credit and trust of their readers while continually revising and renegotiating the terms on which that credit is to be extended. By interpolating spurious or broken contracts between characters into the structure of their narratives, these texts foreground the unstable or even illegible terms of the contract which literary texts make with their readers.</p>

scholarly journals Uncertain Credit: Melville's Affective Economies

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Alistair Murray
Keyword(s):  
Literary Texts ◽  
Legal Authority ◽  
Confidence Man ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility ◽  
Contractual Relations ◽  
The Law ◽  
Benito Cereno

<p>Despite taking place in putatively “lawless” settings, Melville’s maritime fiction maps complex economies of obligation: characters draw up contracts, extend credit, and broker promissory exchanges for goods among themselves, in spite of the absence of any state or legal authority which would enforce their agreements and thereby guarantee the speculative values they call into being. Instead of being underwritten by the law, these contractual relations are characterised by their affective conditions of possibility. In these works, transacting business with strangers in mobile and itinerant spaces requires characters to develop ways of reading the character and creditworthiness of others in order to suppress suspicion and install confidence in its place. Taking “Benito Cereno” (1855) and The Confidence-Man (1857) as its key texts, this thesis tracks these economies of obligation as they emerge in and around Melville’s maritime fictions, which solicit the credit and trust of their readers while continually revising and renegotiating the terms on which that credit is to be extended. By interpolating spurious or broken contracts between characters into the structure of their narratives, these texts foreground the unstable or even illegible terms of the contract which literary texts make with their readers.</p>

The Courtroom as a Site of Epistemic Resistance: Mandela at Rivonia

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Awol K. Allo
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
African National Congress ◽  
Liberation Movement ◽  
Nelson Mandela ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility ◽  
National Congress ◽  
The Law ◽  
A Site

The 1963–64 trial of Nelson Mandela and other leading members of the liberation movement was a political trial par excellence. In the courtroom, the Apartheid government was trying the accused for the crime of sabotage but in the court of public opinion, it was using the event of the trial to produce images and ideas aimed at slandering and discrediting the African National Congress (ANC) and the movement for a free and democratic South Africa. The defendants, on their part, used their trial to denounce the racist policies of Apartheid and to outline their vision of a post-Apartheid society. In this article, I want to read Nelson Mandela’s counter-historical mobilization of lived experiences and memories of Africans – the scars, chains, the rage and Apartheid’s unlivable juridical bind – as an act of epistemic resistance that re-opened epistemic battles and effected epistemic renegotiations. By submitting himself to the very law he denounces, strategically positioning himself at law’s aporetic sites and moments – those most fragile frontiers that are so heavily policed from transformative interventions – he bears witness to Apartheid’s rotten foundation. Drawing on modes of critique that are performative and genealogical, those that are possible within law’s frameworks and categories, Mandela both obeys and defies the law, uses and critiques it, resists and claims authority, at the very site he is called to account for charges of sabotage. The article will show, how, by attending to contradictions, discursive dynamics, and points of tension, Mandela the accused creates conditions of possibility for forms of critique that register without being co-opted or domesticated by the discourse and the system it resists.

scholarly journals Hospitality, or Kant’s Critique of Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights

2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 537-559 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Meckstroth
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
International Politics ◽  
The State ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility ◽  
The Law ◽  
Global Peace ◽  
Ius Gentium

Kant’s theory of international politics and his right of hospitality are commonly associated with expansive projects of securing human rights or cosmopolitan governance beyond state borders. This article shows how this view misunderstands Kant’s criticism of the law of nations ( ius gentium) tradition as handed down into the eighteenth century as well as the logic of his radical alternative, which was designed to explain the conditions of possibility of global peace as a solution to the Hobbesian problem of a war of all against all in the state of nature. I resolve longstanding confusion over the meaning and justification of Kant’s right of “hospitality” by showing how it functions not as a freestanding positive claim demanding enforcement but as a way of ruling out specious justifications for war against those the traditional law of nations permitted one to label “enemies.” This poses important questions for contemporary theories of global justice.

Ethical Challenges: Less About Moral Wrongdoing and More About Communication Breakdown

2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 72-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula Leslie ◽  
Mary Casper
Keyword(s):  
Ethical Challenges ◽  
Speech Language Pathology ◽  
Thickened Liquids ◽  
Communication Breakdown ◽  
Professional Duty ◽  
Language Pathology ◽  
The Law ◽  
Personal Case

“My patient refuses thickened liquids, should I discharge them from my caseload?” A version of this question appears at least weekly on the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association's Community pages. People talk of respecting the patient's right to be non-compliant with speech-language pathology recommendations. We challenge use of the word “respect” and calling a patient “non-compliant” in the same sentence: does use of the latter term preclude the former? In this article we will share our reflections on why we are interested in these so called “ethical challenges” from a personal case level to what our professional duty requires of us. Our proposal is that the problems that we encounter are less to do with ethical or moral puzzles and usually due to inadequate communication. We will outline resources that clinicians may use to support their work from what seems to be a straightforward case to those that are mired in complexity. And we will tackle fears and facts regarding litigation and the law.

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