Matthias Fritsch

This chapter develops an eco-deconstructive account of normativity in relation to well-known but divergent accounts of the emergence of ‘value’ in nature. Value has been argued to emerge with the individual capacity for suffering, with individual self-valuing, or with holistic ecological entities (species, eco-systems, etc.), these three often being seen as at odds with one another. I argue that an entity can become individualized, and thus acquire individual ‘value,’ only in on-going confrontations with other beings and the wider environment. Each living being can be seen as valuing its own life, then, only in response to a vulnerable exposure to its environment that it cannot just claim as its own: its self-affirmation necessarily affirms others and its environment. In this way, the three sources are interconnected in an aporetic matrix of ecological normativities.

The environmental crisis, one of the great challenges of our time, tends to disenfranchise those who come after us. Arguing that as temporary inhabitants of the earth, we cannot be indifferent to future generations, this book draws on the resources of phenomenology and poststructuralism to help us conceive of moral relations in connection with human temporality. Demonstrating that moral and political normativity emerge with generational time, the time of birth and death, this book proposes two related models of intergenerational and environmental justice. The first entails a form of indirect reciprocity, in which we owe future people both because of their needs and interests and because we ourselves have been the beneficiaries of peoples past; the second posits a generational taking of turns that Matthias Fritsch applies to both our institutions and our natural environment, in other words, to the earth as a whole. Offering new readings of key philosophers, and emphasizing the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida in particular, Taking Turns with the Earth disrupts human-centered notions of terrestrial appropriation and sharing to give us a new continental philosophical account of future-oriented justice.

While it is generally accepted that deconstruction’s principal target is the “metaphysics of presence” and thus a presentist conception of time and being, it is less well known that Derrida connected the deconstruction of presence to an idea of justice that is from the beginning intergenerational, that is, concerned with the dead and the unborn. The first section of this paper re-inscribes the idea of “my life” or “our life” in Derrida’s concept of life as “living-on” to show that justice arises with a disjointed time that began before me and is already in the process of outstripping my life toward a future without me. In the second section, I sketch a concept of indirect intergenerational reciprocity in conversation with Derrida as well as with extant work on reciprocity in normative theory and economics. While Derrida’s ideas can be operationalized and fleshed out with the help of this other literature, the disjointed time pertaining to living-on permits new responses to some common objections to intergenerational reciprocity.

In the face of the ever-growing effect the actions of the present may have upon future people, most conspicuously around climate change, democracy has been accused, with good justification, of a presentist bias: of systemically favouring the presently living. By contrast, this paper will argue that the intimate relation, both quasi-ontological and normative, that Derrida's work establishes between temporality and justice insists upon another, more future-regarding aspect of democracy. We can get at this aspect by arguing for two consequences of the deconstructive affirmation of sur-vivre, of the alterity of death in life. Firstly, justice is not first of all justice for the living, but intergenerational from the start. This is so because no generation coincides with itself; rather, it dies and is reborn at every moment, and so – and this is the second consequence – consists in taking turns. Affirming life as living-on means affirming that it involves exchanging life's stations, as the young become the old, and the unborn become the dead. In this sense, the justice of living-on, I will argue, shares an essential feature with democracy, whose principle of exchanging the rulers with the ruled led Derrida to characterize it in terms of the wheel. Democracy consists in the principled assent to power changing hands, a switchover life demands of every generation at every turn. This assent further requires an acceptance of the gift of inheritance without which no life can survive. But as the gift can also never be fully acknowledged or appropriated, it must be passed on to the indefinite, unknown future, in a turning that is the time of life.

Responding to Derrida's Death Penalty Seminar of 1999–2000 and its interpretation by Michael Naas, in this paper I argue that Derrida's deconstruction of the theologico-political concept of the sovereign right over life and death in view of abolishing capital punishment should be understood in terms of the unconditional renunciation of sovereignty that dominates Derrida's later political writings, Rogues (2005) in particular. My reading takes seriously what I call the functional need for a “theological” moment in sovereignty beyond a merely historicist or genealogical interpretation of the European monotheistic heritage. Further, I ask how Derrida can follow through on his goal of developing the allegedly first principled philosophical stance against capital punishment. To this end, I assemble some ingredients of this complex but “unconditional” abolitionism, one that doubts our comprehension of and active relation to death to the point of questioning the commonsense distinctions among murder, suicide, and legal putting to death. I conclude that, for Derrida, letting another die of hunger or AIDS may be understood as a form of a death sentence, so that a deconstructive abolitionism leaves no room for the development of a good conscience

To respond to the charge of context-insensitivity, discourse ethics distinguishes justification discourses, which only require that we consider what is equally good for all, and subsequent application discourses, in which the perspective of concrete others must be adopted. This article argues that, despite its pragmatic attractiveness, the separation of justification and application neglects the co-constitutive role that applicability plays for the meaning of normativity. Norms that do not, in a machine-like fashion, produce their cases, cannot already contain their appropriateness to the cases that nonetheless alone justify the existence of norms in th first place. The higher-order norm of appropriateness that enters normativity with th dependence on applications is one that remains implicit, and impossible to determine in advance. Thus, the justification of a norm is always incomplete for conceptual and not merely empirical reasons, as fallibilism typically has it

One of the major political problems the world faces at the moment of its so-called globalization concerns the possibilities of maintaining, transforming, and expanding democracy. Globalization, as the extension of neo-liberal markets, the formation of multi-national, non-democratic economic powers, and the ubiquitous use of teletechnologies, threatens the modus vivendi of older democracies in ways that call for the reinvention of an old idea. Inasmuch as teletechnical globalization transforms space and time so as to put into question their very presence, and inasmuch as deconstruction has always sought to rethink the constitution as well as deconstitution of the metaphysics of presence, I will here examine the concept of democracy that Jacques Derrida developed over the last few years of his life.

The article considers the relationships among three arguments that purport to establish the intrinsically contradictory or paradoxical nature of the modern project aiming at the equal consideration of all. The claim that the inevitable historical insertion of universal-egalitarian norms leads to always particular and untransparent interpretations of grammatically universal norms may be combined with the claim that the logic of determination of political communities tends to generate exclusions. The combination of these two claims lends specific force to the third argument according to which equal consideration perpetually requires the non-egalitarian project of understanding individuals on their own terms. Hence, taking off from a recent debate between Christoph Menke and Jürgen Habermas, I argue that the former is right to diagnose an aporetic self-reflection in egalitarian universalism, while agreeing with the latter about the indispensability of deliberative democratic frameworks for the defence of both egalitarian and non-egalitarian norms. Key Words: Theodor Adorno • deliberative democracy • Jacques Derrida • egalitarianism • equality • Jürgen Habermas • Christoph Menke • singularity • universalism

In the context of the recent proliferation of nationalisms and enemy figures, this paper agrees with the desirability of retaining some of the explanatory and motivational potential of an agonistic account of politics, but gives reasons not to accept too much of Carl Schmitt's account of citizenship. The claim as to the necessarily antagonistic exclusion of concrete others can be supported neither on its own terms nor on Derridian grounds, as Chantal Mouffe, in particular, attempts to do. I then indicate that différance may nonetheless account for strong (but not necessary) tendencies toward exclusion as well as for the intrinsic contradictions of liberal universalism.

This paper argues that Derrida’s aporetic conclusions regarding moral and political concepts, from hospitality to democracy, can only be understood and accepted if the notion of différance and similar infrastructures are taken into account. This is because it is the infrastructures that expose and commit moral and political practices to a double and conflictual (thus aporetic) future: the conditional future that projects horizonal limits and conditions upon the relation to others, and the unconditional future without horizons of anticipation. The argument thus turns against two kinds of interpretation: The first accepts normative unconditionality in ethics but misses its support by the infrastructures. The second rejects unconditionality as a normative commitment precisely because the infrastructural support for unconditionality seems to rule out that it is normatively required. In conclusion, the article thus reconsiders the relation between a quasi-transcendental argument and its normative implications, suggesting that Derrida avoids the naturalistic fallacy