time of violence; deconstruction and value, The

Elizabeth Grosz is profes

sor of critical theory and

philosophy at Monash

University, Australia. She

is the author of Space,

Time and Perversion.

Essays on the Ptks of

Bodies.

I am interested in this paper in exploring the ways in which we may see violence both as a positivity and as the unspoken condition of a certain fantasy of the sustainability of its various others or opposites, peace, love, and so on. Rather than simply condemn or deplore violence, as we tend to do regarding the evils of war and suffering and the everyday horrors, we believe we can ameliorate it. I want to raise the question of violence not simply where it is most obvious and manifest-in the streets, in relations between races, classes, sexes, political oppositions (though I hope what it will raise today does not avoid these issues); but also where is it less obvious, and rarely called by this name, in the domain of knowledges, reflection, thinking, and writing. I want not simply to condemn it, but to explore its constitutive role in the establishment of politics, of thought, of knowledge. For this reason: that, as intellectuals or philosophers (they are not always, or are only rarely, the same thing), we play a part in various structures of violence, whether we choose to or not, not only in our daily but also in our professional and intellectual lives. But it is rare that we have the intellectual resources by which to think the level of our investment in the very violences that constitute our relations to work. I want to use some of the rather sensitive and self-conscious resources provided by Jacques Derrida to look at the very violence of writing, of thought, and of knowing as the conditions of possibility and of existence of our own immersion in disciplinarity.

Derrida has never written on anything other than politics and violence. I would argue that his are among the most intensely political texts of the late twentieth century, though the language he uses is not one he shares in common with political theory. He is commonly accused of blurring or immobilizing politics, of refusing to provide answers or the conditions of answers to political problems, and of reducing political to theoretical problems. While critical and perhaps in that sense useful, his work is commonly regarded as simply ironic, parodic, skeptical, negative. Deconstructive, perhaps, but never adequately constructive; able to criticize politics, but never able to contribute positively to it.

I would like to argue, contrary to this prevailing representation of Derrida's politics as negativism, nihilism, or anarchism, that he offers a profound, if unsettling reconfiguration of political activity that centers on the question of violence. It is true that he refuses to offer political advice, to provide remedies or solutions to answer the pressing needs of today. But it is the very idea that we can find a solution to these questions, and to the question of violence, that is put under political interrogation. Derrida refuses the kinds of questions that for others define the political; which does not mean that he abandons or refuses politics, but rather, that he engages in different ways and in posing different questions.

The nature of the violence he both articulates and mobilizes is discernible only through a careful reading of a number of texts in which he appears to be talking of other matters. The question of violence is never very far from these matters. Whenever he talks of force (Derrida 1990), of discord (Derrida 1982), of the trace (Derrida 1974a), as well as in texts more explicitly devoted to the question of violence (Derrida 1974b), it is with the politics of violence that Derrida deals. Derrida has addressed the more manifest and concrete political issues of violence-in relation to race and apartheid, in his writings for Nelson Mandela, in his writings on feminist questions, in his discussions of the rhetoric of drugs, and so on-in a much more explicit and direct manner than virtually any other contemporary philosopher one can think of. That his works are seen as apolitical, as lacking a mode of political address, is surely the result of a certain freezing up of politics and an attempt to constrain it to well-known or predetermined forms, the very forms whose naturalness or stability is contested through deconstruction.

In Of Grammatology, Derrida asks the crucial question, which in a sense I want to adopt as my own: "What links writing to violence? And what must violence be in order for something in it to be equivalent to the operation of the trace?" (1974a, 112). In what ways is violence bound up with the structures of equivocation, of diff?rance, of undecidability that so radically structure and unhinge all discourse and all representation, all modes of self-presence? If violence is no longer so simply identifiable and denounceable, if it is not readily delimited in its spheres of operation, if it becomes ambiguous where the divide between violence and its others can be drawn, then violence is a form, possibly the only form, that writing or the trace can take.