Jacques Derrida's First Visit to China: A Summary of His Lectures and Seminars Ning Zhang*

I. Derrida and China China figured early in Derrida's philosophical writings. By 1967, the possibility that the system o f Chinese writing might suit his project o f deconstructing Western logocentrism bulks large in Of Grammatology, one o f the three books he published that year which were to establish his reputation as a deconstrucfive philosopher. His own relations with China, however, were largely channeled through or mediated by scholars and scholarly discourse in N o r t h America. Likewise, English translations o f Derrida's works have played a dominant role in the reception o f his thinking within Chinese academic circles. Thus, o f his seven books now available in Chinese translation, only two come directly from the original French. The irony inherent in this predicament has not been lost on Derrida himself. In the preface he contributed to the Chinese translation o f Writing and Difference, he observes: This is a paradox, since, from the outset, my allusions to China, at least in an imaginary or fantastical manner, were most significant for me--references, that is, not necessarilyto present day China, but to the history, culture, and literature of China. So, as the scope of my philosophical concerns became progressively more international in the last forty years, there is a considerable omission, of which I was conscious even if I could not rectify it----and that gap is China. (Derrida 2001: 5) When, some two decades later, in 1989, this imaginary, long-distance

* Research fellow, Center for the Study of Modem and Contemporary China, Ecole des hautes 6tudes en sciences sociales,Paris. E-mail: [email protected].

Dao:A Journalof ComparativePhilosophyDecember 2002, Vol. II, No. 1, pp. 141-162. 9 2002 by Global ScholarlyPublications.

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yet abiding, relationship was on the point of consummation through a visit, the events in Tiananmen Square rendered it impossible. Finally, another decade later, invitations were renewed from three eminent research universities: Beijing, Nanjing, and Fudan universitiesmsupplemented by invitations from the Academy of Social Sciences in Shanghai and from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. So, with the support of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Derrida at last made his first visit to China in September, 2001, a trip of three weeks duration, to Beijing, Nanjing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. Belated as the visit was, recognition was readily forthcoming, with the conferral of titular honorary professorships from all three mainland universities, while the Academy in Shanghai bestowed on him its tide of Honorary Fellow. During this visit, Derrida gave three public lectures: "Pardon: the Unpardonable and the lmprescriptible" (Den'ida 2001a); "'The Future of the Profession or the University without Conditions" (Derrida 20011); and "Globalizafion and Capital Punishment" (Derrida 200h). In addition, a number of seminars were organized on the following topics: ''Pardon and Ethical Practice" (Derrida 2001b); "University, Humanities, and Democracy" (Derrida 2001c); "Twenty-First Century's Social Sdences and The Speclers ofMarrd' (Derrida 2001d); "Deconstruction and Globalizing Capitalism" (Derrida 2001e); "Ontology and Deconstmcfion'" (Den'ida 2001g); and "Deconstrucfion and Ethical Concern" (Derrida 20010. In the following, I shall summarize some main themes in these lectures and seminars. 1

II. The Three Public Lectures I. Pardon and Forgiveness The first public lecture took place at the Conference Hall of the Science Building of Beijing University on September 4, 2001, following a ceremony to confer upon J. Derrida the tide of Honorary Professor. In his lecture, "Pardon: the Unpardonable and the Imprescriptible," Derrida argued that the unforgivable is the very condition for the act of forgiveness and explained the pertinence of forgiveness to the juristic notion of the imprescfipfible in relation to "crimes against humanity" invented after the Second World War. He first showed from a semantic point of view the "apode" of unconditional and conditional forgiveness within the Western legacy:

The Latin originof the word "pardon" or "forgiveness"refers to "don" (the gift) t The followingsummaryis based on author's transcriptionof tape recordingsof Derrida's lecturesand seminars.Derridaread this articlebefore it appears here.

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and to "donate" or "forgive," in a way which is too complicated for us to approach frontally today .... Between don/thegift and pardon/forgiveness, there is at least the affinity or alliance asking both of them, don/gO~ and pardon/forgiveness-- that is giving for giving, donpar don, to have in principle an essential relation to time, to the movement of temporalization, in addition to their unconditional nature; though what seems to bind forgiveness to a past, which in a certain way has not yet passed, makes forgiveness an experience irreducible to that of the gift, which is more usually related to the present, to the presentation or presence of the present (gift). (Derrida 2001a) W i t h a p e r f o r m a t i v e - a c t f u n c t i o n , the use o f p a r d o n / f o r g i v e n e s s a q u e s t i o n a b o u t the p o s s i b i l i t y o f its subject:

raises

Among the forms of pardon/forgive, we have "pardonne-moi" (the singular of you), "pardonnez-moi" (the plural of you), "pardonnez-nous," or "pardonnenous" (the plural of me). These four possibilities of forgiveness that distinguish essentially between the singular and the plural must be multiplied by all the alternatives of the question of "who" and "what," and this allows for a lot of possibilities. Today, its most massive and most easily identifiable form might be that of a plural singular, and we will begin with this one: can one ask for forgiveness from more than one person, from one group, a collectivity, a community? Does one have the fight to do so? Does it conform to the sense of forgiveness? Is it possible to ask for forgiveness from or to give it to a plural singular for a singular harm or crime? .... Somehow it seems to us that forgiveness can only be asked for or granted in a one-to-one, face-to-face way; in other words, it takes place only between the one who has committed the irreparable or non-reversible harm and the one who has suffered it and who is alone able to hear the request for forgiveness and to grant or refuse it. This solitude of two, in the scene of forgiveness, would seem to deprive any forgiveness, which a group (of anonymous victims, sometimes dead, or of their representatives, descendants, or survivors) asked for collectively in the name of a community (a church, an institution, or a corporation) of its true meaning or authenticity. In the same way, this singular, even quasi-secret loneliness of forgiveness, perhaps makes it an experience foreign to the field of law, punishment or penalties, public institutions, or judicial calculation. (Derrida 2001a) C o n t r a s t i n g the a r g u m e n t s f o c u s i n g o n the c h a l l e n g e o f f o r g i v e n e s s t o the p e n a l l o g i c o f V l a d i m i r J a n k ~ l ~ v i t c h in his On Pardon (lank~l~vitch 1967: 165) w i t h t h o s e in his o t h e r b o o k , The Imprescriptible 0 a n k ~ R v i t c h 1956), D e r r i d a tried t o s h o w their logical i n c o n s i s t e n c i e s in o r d e r to b r i n g to light the h e t e r o g e n e i t y a n d u n d i s s o c i a b i l i l i t y o f b e t w e e n f o r g i v e n e s s a n d the u n f o r g i v a b l e a n d the i m p r e s c r i p t i b l e . T w o p o w e r f u l a r g u m e n t s f o r J a n k ~ l~vitch's a n n o u n c e m e n t " P a r d o n d i e d in the d e a t h c a m p s " in The Imprescriptible d r a w D e r r i d a ' s a t t e n t i o n : The first is that forgiveness can only be given to those who have asked for it, either explicitly or implicitly (this difference is not slight); at least one can consider the possibility of forgiveness on condition that it is demanded. This means perhaps that we will never forgive someone who does not acknowledge his fault, does not repent of it, and does not ask for forgiveness, neither explicitly nor implicitly. This link between forgiveness asked for and forgiveness given does not seem to me to be a routine matter, even if it still seems required by a religious

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and spiritual tradition of forgiveness. I wonder whether a break in this reciprocity or symmetry, or the dissociation between the two, is not obligatory for any forgiveness deserving of this name. The second axiom that we find traces of in many texts which we will analyze in the future is that, when the crime is so serious, when it crosses the line between radical evil and humanity, when it becomes monstrous, forgiveness will be out of the question, as it has to be kept between human beings, proportionate to mankind; that seems to me to be also problematic although it is very powerful and very dassical. (Derrida 2001a) Derrida argued that Jankrl&itch's fn:st point presupposes a histo[y o f forgiveness whose end is marked by the Nazis' project o f exterminating the Jews. Jankrlrvitch believed that because the Germans never asked for forgiveness, the Nazis' project represented the end o f the history o f forgiveness or its final limitation. This presupposition is questionable even within the same heritage which Jankrl&itch refers to, because there is a force, a desire, a burst, a movement, a call inside the very meaning o f forgiveness; it demands that forgiveness should be given, if it can be, even to someone who does not ask for it, who does not repent his action or confess his guilt, or w h o neither improves himself nor redeems his error. "Being asked" cannot then be the condition o f real forgiveness; real forgiveness has a dimension o f "byperbolical ethics" and goes beyond the boundary o f the current, dominating, religious, juridical, political, and psychological semantics o f forgiveness. Derrida suggested that maybe Janktltvitcb's end o f the history o f forgiveness marked by the Shoah is actually its beginning, since because o f it, a rethinking o f the human condition o f forgiveness as well as an institutionalization o f some hyperbolic ethical values in the international juridical system become possible after the Second World War. Janltltvitch's second point, which emphasizes the idea that the monstrous crimes committed by the Nazis make forgiveness impossible between people, seems to suggest that forgiveness is a purely human affair. For Derrida, it is precisely this concept o f "human" that needs to be analyzed dosely, because it has to do with all the issues involved with such questions: Is forgiveness a human affair, a human-specificproperty, a human power or an exclusive power of God? ls it an experience or an existential opening to the supernatural as superhuman: divine, transcendent or immanent, sacred, holy or secular? We see regularly that all debate about forgiveness is also debate about this boundary and the crossing of this boundary. Such a boundary divides what is called the human and the divine as well as what is called the animal, the human, and the divine. (Derrida 2001a)

2. The Unconditional Uniuersity Derrida's second public lecture was given at Fudan University in Shanghai on September 12, 2001, the day after the terrorist attack on the World

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Trade Center in New York. Having spent almost the entire night in front of the television, Derrida, like most of the audience in the University's Assembly Hall, had had a sleepless night. He said before his lecture, At this very grave moment that we have spent together, I hope this ceremony that calls us here together is not irrelevant to the agonizing tragedy that kept us awake last night. I believe that, like me, you see from these terrible signals a reminder for us to keep alert in the face of such an event. Symptomatic as it is of a new phase in world history, its consequences are still difficult to foresee. We have to keep thinking about all that is happening in the course of globalization. (Derrida 2001f)

Professor Sihe Chen ~ , ~ 1 of the Chinese Department presided over the title-giving ceremony where Professor Hongsheng Wang ~ E ~ , the current president of the University, delivered a speech in recognition of Derrida's contribution to the humanities. The topic of the lecture immediately following was on "The Future of the Profession or the University without Conditions." From the distinction he made of three original meanhags of the word "profession:" the profession of faith, the professoriat, and profession, Derrida unfolded his arguments for an unconditional University. This distinction has a deep relationship with the idea of the modem European University, where the role of the teaching profession began to be distinguished from that of the religious and other professions and made the Humanities the very structural foundation of the modern University, which ought to acknowledge in addition to so-called academic freedom, an unconditional freedom of questioning and proposition, even the right of saying in public anything which demands truth-researching, learning, and thinking. (Derrida

2ooI0

Although its value is discussed endlessly, this commitment to truth without limit declared by the modem University ought to be carried on in the unconditional University in a deconstructive way in order to keep the University as an area of critical resistance to all dogmatic appropriative powers. I refer to the right of deconstruction as an unconditional right to ask critical questions not only about the history of the concept of human, but also about that of the notion of critique, about the questioning form and its authority, as well as the interrogative form of thinking.... This principle of unconditional resistance is a right that the University itself ought to at the same time reflect, invent, and demand; law faculties or the new Humanities should be able to work on these questions of right and law--that is, more directly, the Humanities should be able to undertake responsibility for the deconstructive task, which begins with deconstructing their own history and their own axioms. (Derrida 20010

In the second part of his discourse, Derrida tried to analyze the possibility of the so-called unconditional University from the relationship between faith and knowledge of the teaching profession with the aide of the

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Kantian reflective judgment modality "as if" (als ob, comme st). For him, this "as if" is not only the modality of the teaching profession, but also the place where events could happen to change the University as well as its relationship to the outside world. In the third part, he further discussed the relation and distinction among the profession of faith, profession, and professoriat in the sense of work (travaiO. Derrida then devoted the fourth part of his lecture to a critical analysis of the "end of work" theory that appears in the course of globalization (mondialisation). Specifically, he discussed Jeremy

Pdfldn' s The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era (Rifka 1995). Derrida concluded with seven proposals for the new Humanities that the unconditional University should deal with: 1) the history of the human, ideas, and notion of what is proper to human; 2) the history of democracy and of the concept of sovereignty; 3) the history of the "professing;" of the "profession," and the "professoriat"; 4) the history of literature; 5) the history of profession, of the profession of faith, and of professionalization and of the professoriat; 6) the history of the "as if"-of this precious distinction between performative act and constative act; 7) the characteristic of the arrival of the arrived one (ardvance) (see Derrida

20010. 3. Globalization and Capital Punishment Derrida's third public lecture was given in English on September 17, 2001 at the invitation of Chung Chi College and the Department of Philosophy of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, as the inaugural speaker of the endowed "Distinguished Scholar Lectureship." The topic was "Globalization and Capital Punishment." The lecture was attended by an audience of over 300 local and international scholars, with students and teachers from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. As Kwok-ying Lau reported, Many guests and senior staff had to sit on the staircase or stood at the back of the lecture hall for two hours, listening attentively and waiting for the opportunity to raise questions. There were some one hundred disappointed late comers, many of whom made subsequent phone calls and sent e-mail to request the re-

transmissionof the event online. (Lau) Derrida chose to make some preliminary remarks on the death penalty, instead of using his prepared text to open the discussion, by referring to the terrorist acts that had occurred just a few days ago in New York. He said that this tragedy was a terrible experience, but it compelled us to think differently about a number of things, including the death penalty. So he said that the subtitle for his introductory lecture might be "What is war?" He recognized that the concept of war is changing. How to make a war? To whom do we have the war? What is an enemy? What is a public enemy?

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Then he started his lecture on punishment with Rousseau's definition of the guilty as the one who has to be sentenced as a public enemy. Since the concepts of war and public enemy have a lot to do with the question of death penalty, Derrida asked, when some Nation-States abolish the death penalty within the borders of their own territory, what is then an internal enemy? What is a terrorist? When a terrorist is inside the territory, is he an enemy from the outside or not? In order to answer these questions, Derrida mentioned two important facts: The first is that, during the last ten years, a majority of Nation-States over the world have abolished the death penalty. Ten years ago, there was a small majority of Nation-States maintaining and enforcing the death penalty. Now, the majority have abolished or suspended it. Among the minority of those who have maintained and continued to enforce the death penalty, we have the United States, China (not including Hong Kong), and a number of Moslem-Arabic States. Imagine that today, instead of the United States, some European countries, such as France and Germany, were attacked in the way in which New York and Washington were attacked; suppose that they arrested the main suspects; they could not sentence him to death inside their territory, while in the United States the guilty one might be condemned to death. That makes a difference. According to the current global system of international law under the Penal International Tribunal, even if one is judged as a criminal in war and guilty of crimes against humanity during wartime, we know that--whatever the crime or however serious it is--this person won't be sentenced to death. That creates a change in our process of globalization. The second is that in 1972, there was in France a trial in which the guilty party was defended by Robert Badinter, a famous French attorney who was the Minister of Justice in 1981 when France abolished the death penalty. He was defending the criminal when he heard over the radio that in the United States the Supreme Court had made a dramatic decision, making the death penalty unconstitutional because it was in contradiction with two amendments in the Constitution: it was considered cruel and unusual punishment and was discriminatory. So executions were suspended by the Federal Supreme Court of the United States. But in 1977 the death penalty was reestablished in the United States because some States decided that execution by lethal injection was not cruel. That is why one of our questions is what cruelty means. So the death penalty was again established in the United States. The statistics show that the number of people executed is constandy increasing, especially in Texas where the current president said that he never pardoned anyone when he was governor. (Derrida 2001h)

Derrida also narrated an experience he had in one of his many lectures on the death penalty in the United States. A professor in Chicago once asked him after his lecture: "You say that you are against the death penalty and that no philosopher up to now has elaborated a consistent discourse against the death penalty. So it is a matter of heart--do you think that your heart is better than that of others?" Derrida answered: "Yes, probably better than yours." In Derrida's view, the question of heart or compassion is a serious one. Then the Chicago professor said to him, "Well, in the United States, statistics shows that the majority of people are in favor of the death penalty. We are a democratic society, and so we can not go against the majority's

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decisions." Den'ida's answer was that democracy does not consist simply in following the opinion of the majority. In fact, Derrida argued, In France too, we knew that, at the moment when the death penalty was abolished by the French government, the opinion of the majority of the public was unfavorable, and probably is still so even today. So parfiamentary democracy does not consist in following public opinion. Although in France, when Francois Mitterrand became President of the Republic and the death penalty was abolished, it was an apparently spontaneous decision on the part of the French government, it met with approval from the Right, including the current French President, Chirac. Going beyond the opposition of political parties, this decision was already responding to the international trends within Europe. Today, as you probably know, you cannot join the European Community without abolishing the death penalty. Is the 1972 decision of the Federal Supreme Court of the United States, which considered the death penalty unconstitutional, nondemocratic? Is the Supreme Court non-democratic? I asked this professor; and he said, "No, because the members of the Supreme Court are appointed rather than elected." So here are a number of very complicated issues which of necessity will lead me to examine the question of the sovereignty of the State and democracy, and the globalization of the unconditional abolition of the death penalty. (Derrida 2001h)

After drawing attention to the potential danger of approaching the socalled globalization process merely in a technological and economic sense, Derrida remarked: "We are facing a theatrical demonstration and the embodiment o f a n e v e n t in w h i c h the e n e m y is faceless, stateless, b u t nevertheless, on which the United States declared war"(Derrida 2001h). Derrida set out his lecture on the death penalty from four points of view:. The first is the theological-political dimension of the death penalty; the second is the question of religion; the third, the question of visibility and publicity; and fmMly, the question of cruelty. I will relate these points of view to the question of sovereignty, decision, and exception before going back to the question about war raised at the beginning of our lecture. Are the concepts of war available for analyzing the current war? (Derrida 2001h)

First, as he pointed out, in the Western tradition the death penalty was a conveyor of the complicity between politics and religion; he did this through the analysis o f the four paradigmatic cases of capital punishment Socrates as a philosopher, Jesus, El Hallfij (922), and Joan of Arc (1431). They are different cases: Socrates was a pagan philosopher, Jesus was what you know him as, Joan of Arc was a Christian, and E1 Hallfij was a Moslem. What they have in common is that in these four cases, the charge against them was a religious one. But the trials and the executions were political. It is the authority of the State that condemns and executes them. So we have here what I will call theological-political power without which we can not understand what is going on with the death penalty. So it is theologicalpolitical, which does not mean that we know what the term "theologicalpolitical" means. It does not mean that because we know what theological-

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political means we can then apply this concept to the case of the death penalty as if the death penalty was simply an example of theological-political authority. My assumption is that through the analysis of many assumptions behind the death penalty, we can understand what the theological-political means and is. I relate it to philosophy as such. Let me tell you why. To my knowledge, there have been no philosophers in the Western tradition, until now, who have condemned the death penalty in their philosophical discourse. All the philosophers I know are, or have been, in favor of the death penalty. Some of them are against it in their hearts but not in their philosophical system. There is no room in their system for the condemnation of capital punishment.... The question is: Why is philosophy in the West so essentially linked with the possibility and necessity of capital punishment? I have a number of doubts. One of them is that these philosophers from Kant through Hegel and up to us are of indispensable necessity forced to link their ontological and metaphysical system with the State and the authority of the State, because they can not challenge the death penalty without questioning the sovereign and authority of the state. (2001h)

Second, Derrida talked about the death penalty and religion in the West. In his view, when the Old Testament says, in the name of God, that anyone who transgresses the Ten Commandments should be put in death, this is already a religious set of prescription. So, Derrida argued that the death penalty already has its foundation in the Bible and not merely in the law of retaliation. Then Derrida moved on to discuss how this view was opposed by some French writers: I told you that there is no philosopher I know of who condemns the death penalty, but there are a number of writers who are opposed to it, among them the French writer, Victor Hugo, who was a militant and eloquent writer read all over the world during the 19th century. His opposition to the death penalty had been already globalized because he was sending articles worldwide to help those who were condemned. Hugo asked for a pure and simple abolition of the death penalty, because up until then, there had been sometimes a partial abolition for political charges. He was in favor of an unconditional, pure, and simple abolition. However, he referred to two sources of opposition: one was the Church and the other was the terror of the French Revolution. As you know, at the beginning of the French Revolution, Robespierre was opposed to the death penalty and he wrote against it, following the example of Beccaria (1738-1794), the famous Italian lawyer who produced a discourse against the death penalty. Then he changed his mind during the Revolution, resulting in the terror of the guillotine. Victor Hugo called for the abolition of the death penalty both in the name of Christianity and in the name of one moment of the French Revolution..Mbert Camus was another French author who wrote against the death penalty in his essay "Reflection on the Guillotine." He daimed that in a world in which religion persists, the death penalty will exist; a world without the notions of heaven, promise, and immortality would have no justification for the death penalty. So for him, the end of the death penalty goes along with the end of religion (see Camus: 119-170). (Derrida 2001h)

Derrida also related this religious view of the death penalty to a different tradition beginning in the 18th century with the Italian lawyer Beccaria. Beccaria published the book Dei deletti et dellepene (The Offences and the Punishments) in which he argued that the death penalty is neither justifiable nor

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useful. This argument became a major reference for all those who are against the death penalty, from Robespierre to Robert Badinter. Den:ida, however, provided a different reading of the text: I would like to refer to this religious consideration for the abolition of the death penalty, which bdongs to another tradition beginning in the 18~ century with the Italian Becarria. He was a great man. Neverthdess, he said that the death penalty should be abolished with certain exceptions. The question of the exceptions is also a major issue here; for him the death penalty should be abolished not because it is inhuman, not because it is in principal not provable, but because it is not cruel enough (laughter in audience). He argued that life imprisonment and forced labor are more erud and, therefore, more convincing. We have to be very careful with these arguments. I admire this man, but I have reservations about his arguments. (Derrida 2001h)

Then, Den'ida took time to discuss the view of Kant, who Derrida believed was the most important o f those great philosophers whose view should be deconstructed: Kant disagreed with anyone who justified the death penalty in the name of utility, exemplariness, and social security. He claimed that the death penalty is just in and by principle and not in and by its utility. A man who has committed a murder must be punished because he is punishable. He gave an example in his work: imagine a community on an island, Hong Kong for instance (laughter in audience); its members agree that they should leave the island, disperse, and break down the society, but before leaving, they must execute the people condemned to death who are already in jail, because it is just. It is not useful at all, because the society will be dissolved. But in the name of the principle of justice, they have to execute the last guilty one in jail. So for Kant it is a matter of principle. He befieved that the justification for the death penalty on the level of its utility is to insult humanity, because the death penalty for him is a sign of humanity. Only the rational man deserves the death penalty while an animal does not. It is a sign of the dignity of the human being, because only human beings can go beyond life, be above life, and risk their own lives. A human being can lose his life, and that is a sign of human dignity. If we use the death penalty as an article in legislation, it is simply that it structures this institution and represents its human character. (Derrida 2001h)

In Derrida's view, that is one of the reasons why such a constant feature as the attachment to the death penalty is present from Plato up to Kant and through Hegel to Heidegger. For them, one's humanity consists in being able to raise oneself above one's life. The main punishment for Kant is what he calls the law of retaliation: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Den'ida pointed out that, while the name of the law of retaliation comes from Roman law, many of its characters come from the Bible. For Kant, the law of retaliation does not mean revenge; it means the just way of rationally calculating assumption. At the same time, however, Kant daimed that what should be forbidden and absolutely impossible was the death sentence applied to the sovereign. It is less serious to assassinate or kill

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him than to judge him and condemn him to death, because the end of the sovereign would be the end of law, the State, and the nation. The sovereign is someone who could not and should not be judged and sentenced to death. As you know, in the case of the French King Louis XVI, who was sentenced to death, someone said that he was judged precisely as a foreign enemy and others said that he was judged as a French citizen guilty of betraying his nation. So we have again the questions of war, the public enemy, enemies outside or within. For Kant, the sovereignty of the sovereign should not be touched. Then we have the question of sovereignty and the right to power. A sovereign is defined as the absolute power, whose power comes from God, from which of course sovereignty begins. Thus the absolute monarchy gets absolute power from God. Then it changes into democracy with Rousseau, for the sovereignty of the people means the absolute power of people to be the final judge. So the sovereignty of the sovereign is what conditions the death penalty and pardon. The sovereign is someone who has the absolute right to determine the life and the death of citizens and also the absolute right to suspend this. Kant said that a king must have the right to pardon, to be the law above the law. Sometimes, when the law judged and sentenced someone to death, the sovereign had the right to be above it and to suspend this institutional power. So Kant saw it as a good thing that a King has the right to pardon, except when the crime does not concern him. If he isn't the target of the crime, he should not be able to pardon. Kant tried deliberately to define the right to pardon and its conditions. (Derrida 2001 h) D e r r i d a then related this discussion o f death p e n a l t y in W e s t e r n religions to t h e issue o f globalization. I n his view, w e s h o u l d k e e p in m i n d t h e so-called crisis in the s o v e r e i g n t y o f the N a t i o n - S t a t e . It did n o t start today; already in t h e 19 ~ century a n d at the b e g i n n i n g o f the 20 th c e n t u r y there was a crisis o f sovereignty, b u t w e k n o w there has b e e n a m a j o r change in this crisis o f s o v e r e i g n t y today. T h i r d , D e r r i d a discussed the p r o b l e m o f decisiveness a n d the decidable: W h a t , in principle, distinguishes the death p e n a l t y f r o m m u r d e r , killing, o r death? I n D e r r i d a ' s view, the death p e n a l t y is n o t a p r o b l e m o f death; it is a p r o b l e m o f d e a t h d e c i d e d u p o n b y a sovereign N a t i o n - S t a t e o r s o m e t i m e s b y s o m e t h i n g that l o o k s like a N a t i o n - S t a t e . So, There is no death penalty without the authority of the Nation-State. The death penalty is the execution of a legal murder under the politics of a Nation-State. As such, it has to be public. An execution is always public even if in some cultures and some societies the executions are not in a public place. You can not speak strictly and literally of the death penalty when the Nation-state secretly assassinates or executes people without following its ruling establishment. I don't know whether we can speak seriously of the death penalty whenever a NationState puts someone to death. In Europe, the death penalty must be public: the name, the date, and the place should be publicly advertised. Now publicity or being public does not mean simply that the death penalty is visible for everyone. I remind you that Michel Foucault in his Disdp~ne and Punish: Birth of the Prison (Surveiller etpunir:. Naissance de la Prison) mentioned that maybe in the 18th and 19th centuries, punishment and torture had become less and less visible, less and less theatrical, more and more hidden and invisible. Victor Hugo took advantage of the fact that one day in the 19th century the Guillotine was transferred from the center of Paris to the suburbs, to say that this will be a change that prevents the public from seeing this horrible guillotine. When Dr. Guillotin recommended

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the use of the Guillotine in the Revolution, he said that this means of execution was equal for everyone:, it took only one second, it was painless, and it had even a slight sense of pleasure, of freshness in it 0aughter in audience). It was technical progression in the domain of torture. So, people argue that there was less and less publicity, which is true in a certain sense. But I would object to this. For me, it is not a matter of less or more visibility but of the change in the form of visibility. Today, I think we have more visibility through the media, the cinema, and other ways of communication. So we know better than ever who is executed in the United States. That is the major puzzle in globalization and in the struggle against the death penalty. CDerrida 2001h) Finally, Derrida talked a b o u t cruelty: What is cruelty? In the American constitution, as 1 mentioned, cruel is a reference for the abolition and reestablishment of the death penalty. It is a curious question. Cruel can be bloody or bloody-thirsty, physical, visible, and external, but essentially it can be psychic (the pleasure of suffering or making someone suffer for pleasure, seeing someone suffer for pleasure), invisible, and internal. For instance, the German word "grausam"for cruel does not refer to blood. Is lethal injection less bloody and less crud than the guillotine? If you consider cruelty in psychoanalytical terms, what psychic cruelty means is the pleasure taken from making others suffer whether it is bloody or not, then it would be difficult to say that lethal injection is more or less cruel than the guillotine or other methods of execution. The concept of cruelty has its history in the history of the death penalty and it needs further analysis. (Derrida: 17 Sept 2001) Derrida's lecture was regarded by m a n y academics in H o n g K o n g as the m o s t exciting and brilliant o n e given there over the last twenty years.

III. Themes of Seminars In view o f limitations o f space, I will s u m m a r i z e Derrida's seminars, which revolved around three major questions that were c o n f r o n t e d in his trip to China: 1) W h a t is deconstrucfion? 2) The Specters of Marx and globalization; and 3) his reaction to the events o f S e p t e m b e r 11.

1. Deconstruction Not as a Destruction A general misunderstanding o f deconstruction is presented in the following two questions raised frequently by scholars and students during this academic visit: does deconstruction have a dualist oppositional relation with construction? D o e s it mean to destroy and to negate everything? T o answer these questions, Derrida insisted that deconstrucfion and construction do not have a dualist relation. T o deconstruct is not to destroy s o m e t h i n g in order to reconstruct s o m e t h i n g else. D e c o n s t r u c t i o n is an affm-nafion o f the impossible; it is n o t a negation. At his seminar on " O n t o l o g y and D e c o n struction" held at the Shanghai A c a d e m y o f Social Sciences, he gave n o t only a theoretical clarification o f these questions but also an e x e m p l a r y

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d e m o n s t r a t i o n o f his deconstructive strategy. Derrida emphasized that there are a n u m b e r o f angles to a p p r o a c h this huge and vast topic from. H o w e v e r , the leading thread he chose was the question o f writing: W h y is writing so important as an introduction to the question o f deconstruction and ontology? H e started with a few preliminary definitions o f the w o r d s " d e c o n s t r u c t i o n " and " o n t o l o g y " at the point where they cross over each other: Deconstruction or d&onstruction existed already in the French dictionary, although it was not in common use before I used it. In the French dictionary, it means the way of analyzing and decomposing machinery or structural grammar. It has a technical or grammatical sense. It means de-constituting, decomposing complex linguistic or technical machinery. Now, when I used this word, I was trying to translate or transform in my own way a German word, Destruktion, used by Heidegger to refer to precisely the way of analyzing and de-constituting the history of ontology, of classical (and what we call vulgar) ontology, which is the main stream of Western philosophy. Neither Destruktion nor deconstruction means destruction. There is no connotation of destruction within this word. It is a way to undo the structure through memory or genealogical procedures; there is nothing negative in this. So I ti-ied in different contexts to translate this Heideggerian Destruktionwith some changes into French d&onstruction.There are also other German words you can fmd in Freud, and again in Heidegger, such as Abbau. It means at the same time undoing and deconstmcting. (Derrida 2001g) T h e n , Derrida talked a b o u t the context o f his use o f this w o r d in his first text. A t that time, what was d o m i n a n t in France was the so-called structuralism, with a systematic attention paid to structures, linguistic or genetic. H e p r o p o s e d deconstruction as a way o f trying to analyze and u n d o these structures. H e insisted on the fact that deconstruction is n o t h i n g negative; it is not a way o f discrediting anything; it is n o t a critique. Instead, It is, among other things, a genealogy or history of the concept of critique or criticism as you can fred it in Kant or Marx. It is a way of questioning the concept of critique, and so it is not critique in itself. Now, in Heidegger, the concept of Destruktion itself had a history and a genealogy: it came from Martin Luther, the German theologian and the initiator of Protestantism. For Luther, destruct~o--the Latin form of Destruktion---means a way of questioning and undoing the theological Christian heritage built by the first fathers of the Church in order to get to the origin of the Christian message .... So initially it was of theological molding. By asking a number of questions that I cannot summarize here, I tried to dissociate my own practices and interpretation of deconstruction from Heidegger's and especially from Luther's Destruktion. Of course, the way I interpret deconstruction as different from them had something to do with what comes from Nietzsche, Freud, Levinas, and so on and so forth. (Derrida 2001g) I n this context, Derrida proceeded to articulate the question o f deconstruction with the question o f ontology: W h y is deconstruction a way o f interpreting ontology? W h a t is ontology? H e pointed out that ontology, o f course, is a G r e e k concept. It is f o u n d in the G r e e k language. It means the logos, the discourse, science, or knowledge o f on. On in G r e e k means "be-

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ing." He indicated his interest about how this word is translated in Chinese, since the major issue that he is addressing now is the problem of translation. Ontology is a Greek way of asking questions about, and producing a discourse and potentially a science of, on~being. Thus Derrida argued that Being means "being present." O f course, this is also the question posed by Heidegger that we have activated. Heidegger distinguished Seiend (being in English, itant in French, em in Latin) that is being present and presently being (present has a temporal sense and also a topological sense that is present to me and present to @e present. Thus, 'on' means being present) and Sein which means in French Etre, in Latin Esse. In English, there is no way to translate the difference between Seiend and Sdn. So they translated Sdend as "being" with a lowercase "b" and Sein as "Being" with a capital "B" which is rather problematic. Then you have what we call the ontological difference--the difference between "Being" and "to be," between Sdend and Sein, between on and einM. What do we mean by saying that "this is a being?" What does it mean to be? Etre/Sein is nothing. You can never fred anything anywhere that we can call Sein, and yet Sein is presupposed each time we say "tiffs is a being." So everything is an issue in the distinction between Sdend and Sein, or between on and einai in Greek, or between Rant and ~tre in French, or between ens and Esse in Latin. (Derrida

2001g) Thus, Derfida pointed out, the problem of on~being appears to be a sophisticated linguistic and etymological problem, but the consequences of this are enormous. While he was indebted to Heidegger and Husserl for his ideas, Den-ida also delineated how he differed from them, particularly by emphasizing his ideas of writing and trace: I tried to remedy Heidegger's concept of ontological difference by transforming it into what we call diff#ance. What I tried to do, without discrediting anything, without disqualifying philosophy or its authority, was to deconstruct the main prescription of ontology as a science of something that can be considered present. That is to say, I tried to deconstruct the privilege granted to the present. This work had been, of course, already started by Heidegger, but I tried to do this in a different way: to deconstruct what is the main prescription of ontolo g y - t h e discourse on Being as being, Sdn as Sdend, giving a temporal privilege to the now. If you follow the whole tradition of philosophy, you will realize and verify the fact that there is constantly a privilege granted to the present, to the presentness of being, even in Husserl (although I was trained by reading Husserl as a phenomenologist, and my first book is about him. In a way, I must say that, through him, I questioned him and deconstructed him, especially the problem of the "now"). For Husserl, every experience of consciousness is conditioned or takes the form of what he calls der lebendigeGegenwart, the living present. There is nothing in our everyday experience that is not present. You cannot leave the present. We always live in the "now." The living now is what he calls the original form of every experience. There is a punctual now which is the matrix of every experience. I tried to challenge this axiom, this prescription, by showing (that is why I turned to the problem of writing) that there is nothing present without some traces referring to something non-present, some references to something else, somewhere else. That is, the trace of something that is not present determines our experience of the present, and so there is no pure present. A present is always marked by the trace of another present, of the other. Some other is always marked within the presence of the present. This is what I call the

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trace. There is nothing prior to the trace. Everything starts with the trace, which is not very welcome in philosophy. Before Sein and Sdend, before "Being and being," before "there is/ily a," there is the trace. So I tried to generalize, with no limits, endlessly, this concept of the trace. Everything "is" a trace; every experience "is" the structure of a trace. (Derrida 2001g) D e r r i d a told us that it was f r o m that point on that he tried to question and criticize the authority o f the voice as s o m e t h i n g s u p p o s e d to be present, s o m e t h i n g in which our intentions and our meanings are fully present; that he tried to deconstruct the authority o f the voice in all cultures, including Chinese culture, but especially Western culture. H e narrated that it was also at that point that he b e c a m e very m u c h interested in Chinese writing~ I know that, while there are a number of phonetic structures in Chinese writing, these structures do not prevail in the system of writing. How can one transform this concept of writing to resist the authority of what I call phonocentrism and logocentrism in traditional Western philosophy? Already, I tried to point to nonWestern cultures in which logos was not predominant as such, neither were phonocentrism or logocentrism. At the same time, I recognize that in every culture some authority of voice will remain. I am sure that this is also the case with Chinese culture. We have to distinguish carefully between phonocentrism (which I think is universal as a moment in history, as a huge structure in history) and logocentrism (which is more closely Greek, Western, or European). So, I tried to draw up the consequences of this transformation of the concept of writing. What I call writing is not simply a system of graphic or calligraphic location on the page. Writing is everything; even a vocal address is a way of writing; even a silent gesture is, in my vocabulary, a form of writing. This concept, among other consequences, allowed me to question again the limits of the way one interprets the limits of the human being and kproprt de ]'horame. As you know, one often determines and defines humanity or human beings as speaking beings. The riving being that does not speak and write is not human. But I tried, by extending the scope and the space of this concept of writing, to pay attention to writing which is represented not only in so-called non-writing cultures (that is my debate with Levi-Strauss). There are traces and writing even among animal life. (2001g) A t the end, D e r r i d a m a d e two m o r e i m p o r t a n t points. T h e ftrst is the distinction and the link between the trace and writing. H e said that it was for this reason that he had been so interested in the cultures in which the privileged m o d e o f writing is n o t simply d o m i n a t e d by the voice or vocal p h o n e t i c structures. T h e second is that, along with the endless deconstrucd o n o f ontology, while we should pay attention to every original m o m e n t o f this history (Aristode, Plato, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Husserl, and Heidegger) and the differences between these m o m e n t s , we should also try to isolate s o m e stable assumptions and structures, in particular, the authority o f the binary opposition between absence and presence. Derrida w e n t into s o m e details o f this second point, because this is related to w h a t he called the "undecidable" between the binary oppositions: what characterizes the trace is that it is neither absent nor present. This accounts

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for the interest I had in what I called the spectrality, even general spectrality, in our experience through images, telecommunications, and modem media. The specters, the spectral, the haunting structure of the spectral, is neither present nor absent. So it is not simply a third possibility in the dialectic form as Hegel tries to do. No, there is non-binary opposition here. Whatever you analyze in Western philosophy, you will find at least a structuring binary opposition that is also a hierarchy. For instance, in Plato, you find the distinction between aisth~ton and no,ton, between sensible and intelligible. You also find the opposition between activity and passivity and so on. Each time, this binary opposition forms a hierarchy. One is above the other, the intelligible is above the sensible, the active is above the passive, the male is above the female, and so on. Without relying on the dialectical-synthetic dialectics of this binary opposition, I pay attention to something that 1 call the undecidable between the two oppositions. This is a strategic level, not only in terms of speculative philosophy, but in terms of practical transformation; not only in the discourse of concepts, but also in terms of our institutions. I would like to make this clear: deconstruction is not, as is often alleged, simply a speculative, discursive operation of reading texts. Deconstruction is not only related to books in the library. It has something to do with everything--insfitufions, social structures, and political structures--that is dominated precisely by these hierarchies of binary concepts. I have just mentioned the male-female opposition. The whole of Western philosophy has been what 1 call "phallogocentric." The hegemony of logocentrism is at the same time also the hegemony of phallocentrism of the male. So deconstrucfion is also an intervention within social and political fields in which these hierarchies are put to work. I insist upon this point because in certain cases the opponents of deconstrucfion describe deconstruction as a quiet activity in the library, the university, or the academy, just linked to books. This is totally wrong and unfair. So when I insisted that the fust step of deconstruction is to reverse this binary opposition as a hierarchy, it is not simply to replace the former hierarchy by reversing its opposites. The question is how to radically change the structure. Nevertheless, the first step is to reverse it. That is why it is of some political importance to be on the side of the oppressed, women for example, who axe on the lower level in the hierarchy. There is no deconstruction without a strategy, without a long process. We should take different contexts into consideration. That is why there is no one deconstrucfion; there are deconstrucfions, strategies, embodied by different people, in different situations, in different languages, cultures, and memories. That is why deconstruction in France in my own way of practicing it can not be identical to that which is practiced by someone else in the United-States; or why the deconstrucfion practiced by someone in China in the 90s cannot be identical to that practised here today. Deconstmction always entails a singular responsibility to which everyone has to put his signature in a certain way. (2001g) I n c o n c l u s i o n , D e r r i d a e m p h a s i z e d o n c e again t h a t n o t o n l y d o e s dec o n s t r u c t i o n h a v e n o t h i n g s i m p l y n e g a t i v e a n d d e s t r u c t i v e in it, b u t t h a t it i m p l i e s an a f f m ' n a t i o n , a " y e s " : The ".yes" is not simply positive; it is always requited for a gesture of deconstrucuon. What does this mean? Ontology had to do with the privilege granted to the question, to questioning. Philosophy starts with questioning. Socrates starts with questioning: what is Being? Questioning is the main gesture of philosophy. We have to question and we should not give up asking questions. Yetthe condition of questioning, of addressing a question to the other, of questioning the other, is the acceptance of the "yes," of speaking to the other or listening to the other or tracing something. So there is an original "yes"--an affirmation

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that is prior, prior not in the chronological or logical sense, but prior nevertheless to questioning. This is my interpretation of what Heidegger also said (through out his whole life he insisted on 'fragen'--- questioning). He once said, that questioning is the priority of thinking. However, without contradicting this, he also said that "yes" is prior to questioning: there is what he called Zusagen-acquiescence, a way of saying yes, even if you ask a question. In order to question a question, you have to affirm the question and say yes to the other. (Derrida 2001g)

Thus, Den'ida explained, deconstruction comes back again and again, espedally in his own texts, to the originality of the absolute priority of this strange "yes" that is not positive. He emphasizes that this "yes" does not mean positivity. Positivity is something else, not the affirmation of yes. Deconstruction is a way of saying yes, not saying no, to someone. He said that in his questioning of forgiveness, gift, hospitality, and capital punishment, he had drawn the consequences of this original yes, this unconditional ~yes'.

Z SpectersofMarx and EconomicGlobalization Specters of Marx and economic globalization constitute another important topic of Derrida's seminars delivered in China, Which also evoked some misunderstanding and discussion. The topic chosen by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences was "Spectersof Marx and the Twenty-First Century's Social Sciences." Derrida began by saying that it was a particularly significant event for him to talk about Marx at the Academy: When I was asked to talk about Marxism and my book Specters of Marx, I thought over from which point of view and how there axe many possibilit i e s - t o get into this discussion. I asked myself why I chose the problem of heritage as the critical question for this book, and why this problem became my priority in this book, in my study of Marx, and in my present introduction to the book. Finally, I decided to talk about this book in relation to China. Every culture chooses its way from its cultural condition to think of Marx, and China has its own Marxist heritage. (Derrida 2001d)

After he presented his reasons for writing this book, a book that for him is about the problem of legacy, he discussed the context in which this book was published. This book was written in 1993, several years after the crisis in and transformation of the communist countries. The ideas of the end of Marx, the end of communism, and the end of history became a dominant discourse in the West. The theory of the end of history was represented by Francis Fukuyama, who believed that liberal democracy, padiamentarism, and the market economy had overcome the whole world. The other dominant idea was Koj~ve's conclusion: the United States has achieved the last phrase of history as designed by Marx; the American way of life represents the specific way of life of post history; the United States today betokens the 'eternal presence' of humanity's future. (Derrida 2001d)

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He explained why for him Marx's legacy was not over yet: "Although I have never been a Marxist, I don't trust the capitalist market economy" (Derrida 2001d). Specters of Marx still hung over the Western funeral procession for him because capitalism conceals a deep crisis. The funeral ceremony for Marx could not hide the capitalist crisis, which contains the following components: 1) different forms of unemployment; 2) the massive exclusion of homeless citizens from any participation in democratic life; 3) the merciless economic war between countries; 4) the incapacity of mastering the contradictions in the concept, the norms, and the reality of the market economy; 5) the aggravation of external debt and other connected mechanisms starve and drive the greater part of humanity to despair; 6) industry and the commerce of armaments; 7) the uncontrollable extension of atomic armaments in national structures; 8) the multiplication of the interethnic wars; 9) the growing and indefinable power of the Mafia and drug consortiums over all the continents; 10) the current situation of international law and its institutions (See Derrida 1993: 134-136). Finally, he raised three questions for discussion: 1) the relationship between the Specters of Marx and deconstrucfion, which is related to the problem of the auJbebungof Marxism. Derrida insisted that the key question was how to carry forward the theory of Marx while avoiding the dark experiences resulting from the communist practices of the 20 ~ century in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China; 2) the question of "spectrality.'" Den'ida pointed out that if he took this question seriously in his study of Marx, it wasn't because of Marx's well-known saying "Ein Ge~enstgebt sm in Europa--das Ge~enst des Kommsnistms~" nor was it because of Hamlet's relation to the specter of his father. What interested him was the question and the concept of spectrality and its form somewhere between present and absent, which for him was characteristic of Marx's legacy in today's geopolitical order and in the world that becomes more and more virtuMized; 3) the difference between specter (spectr0, phantom (fantSme), and ghost (rwenant). For Derrida, specter and phantom are visible and usually come from the front, while ghost is invisible and appears unforeseeably from any direction. The latter corresponds to the eventness of event. That is why he further insisted on distinguishing the idea of messianicity (messianidte) from that of Messianism (messianism). The latter is a religious notion with an ideological presupposition in which the figure of the Messiah is determined, while the former is a philosophical presupposition which concerns the opening out into the future of the existential structure of all beings----human and animal. All forms of life are essentially structured by this unpredictability of the other's arrival (see Derrida 2001d). A student of the Department of Philosophy in Nanjing University

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asked Derrida the following question after his seminar o n " D e c o n s t r u c t i o n and Globalizing Capitalism" on September 10: " W h e n y o u m e n t i o n e d the w o r d Messianism in Specters of Marx, you said that Messianism is i n d e c o n structible. Is deconstruction indeconstrnctible?" T o this Derrida answered: First of all, I have never said that Messianism is indeconstructible. What I did in SpectersofMarx was to make a distinction between messianicity and Messianism. Generally speaking, Messianism refers to a given figure--the Messiah sent by God to bring peace to the world. You have different forms of Messianism: that of Judaism, of Christianity, of Islam etc. But what I called messianicity is not the Messianism of any of these religious forms. Messianicity refers to universal forms of experience involving expectations concerning the future, with the coming of the other. It is beyond any religious concept. It is the opening up of the experience of all living beings to the other. As a universal structure of experience, as a desire for justice, messianicity is indeconstrucfible because it is the very source of deconstruction. We have to rigorously distinguish between them, although both of them are etymologically linked to a common legacy and memory, the Abrahamic tradition. For the sake of pedagogic convenience, I used messianicity to refer to an almost transcendental structure. It is beyond all sociohistorico-cultural traditions and concerns all living beings. It is the relation to the future as a desire for justice. It is linked also with my questioning of the relationship between law and justice. Law is never equal to justice. It is not only deconstructible but should be deconstructed. Law is the subiect of socio-historical transformation. For instance, take the case of international law; if we agree that law is the subiect of socio-historical transformation, then it is deconstructible. Justice is not law. (2001e) T h e head o f the Institute o f Foreign Languages o f N a n j i n g University reacted to Derrida's idea o f the " N e w International." H e contrasted his understanding o f globalization as primarily economical (i.e., the globalizafion o f the capitalist m o d e o f production) with Derrida's n e w definition. D e r rida's definition, in his view, p r o p o s e s a N e w International f r o m a multicultural perspective. So he asked Derrida w h e t h e r his deconstruction can help to construct a N e w International o f multi-cultural forms and resist e c o n o m i c globalization by focusing on cultural differences. T o this Derrida replied: I hope that deconstruction can help to construct this New International. Besides, deconstruction is the very symptom of the multi-cultural resistance to econot~.c globalization. Of course, deconstruction is not simply the opposite of economic globalization; it allows one to believe that economic development cannot be separated from a transformation of law and right. For instance, the market cannot work independendy; it needs some legal norms. What evokes the current debate is the legal norms whose construction demands a transformation of the conventions and notions of different traditional legacies, as well as a technical transformation. In Marxist words, what it demands is a transformation of superstructure. I think that we should re-interpret the relationship between economic globalizafion and its political conditions, legality, culture, and language by inheriting and transforming Marx's legacy. For instance, one could examine the close relation between the internet and the market, asking about the relationship of its language hegemony to the different cultures. Today, economic problems can not be pure problems of economics. (Derrida 2001e)

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The head of the Institute of Politics agreed that the issue of globalizafion concerns us all. He suggested that we should put aside its semantic differences and its ideal form and simply talk about the present globalization we are going through every day. In this context, he further asked how one should judge this process. He said that what impressed him most in Derrida's discourse is his critical and interrogative attitude toward this globalization. In this context, he further asked the following questions: can we judge this globalization as a global expansion of Western hegemony? If this is not fully the case, does this process have some universal values? If not, does this mean that the New International will totally deconstruct it? To these questions, Derrida provided the following answers: If there was no idealized project or a given teleology of this economic globalization, there would not be the problems we are talking about. In fact, there might be certain contradictory approaches to the ideal economic globalization. First of all, we have today so many debates and conflicts about globalizafion because, in the name of globalization, under a certain transparence and with the appearance of liberal exchange--behind the liberal circulation of commodities, capital, and currencies--a process of homogenization is expanding its frontiers. We know that today this so-called globalization" means, in fact, the hegemony of some Nation-States or groups of Nation-States, of some monopolistic capital groups. World globalization is but the pretext of such hegemony. In human history, we have never seen so many starving men and women, in such a miserable situation, deprived of the right to work. As you know, resistance to the theory of the end of work is a central issue. In human history, we have never seen so many people without jobs. So the real task is to understand both what hides behind this word (which corresponds to the real) and potential hegemony and its intentions .... Between the subjugative discourse of globalization and the reactive, defensive discourse of anti-globalization, we have to find another road; maybe it is what you call the ideal road, but it does not exist, and thus we have no model to follow. Therefore, we have to give up the teleology of liberal and ideal economic development designed by the Enlightenment, the teleology of traditional Marxism with the end of capitalism, and the emergence of a society without State and class. We have to take the responsibility of searching for another road. What deconstruction criticizes is this predetermined idea and what it insists on is inventing solutions before a difficult situation, within an infinite process of historical complexes and contradictions. If there are some general rules that can be offeted for an ideal development, that would be taking advantage of the opening frontiers, liberal circulation, and maximum exchanges, possibly less harmful to the characteristics of different cultures, histories and memories, avoiding a possible homogenization. These are two contradictory and incompatible processes and we don't know which one is more important. That is why we have to shoulder our responsibility and make decisions here. The responsibility of each of us is singular and different. The French responsibility will be different from that of the Chinese; today's Chinese are different from those of the end of 1980s. A man's responsibility will be different from that of a woman, and that of one from Nanjing will be different from someone from Beijing. (Derrida 2001e)

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3. Derrida's Reaction to the Event of September I l W h e n the events o f September 11 t o o k place, Derrida was visiting Shanghai and H o n g K o n g . His reflection to the shocking events constituted an imp o r t a n t part o f his academic trip. I n discussions with teachers and students f r o m Fudan University in the a f t e r n o o n o f September 12, he said: We need our heritages as a reference in order to understand what happened yesterday. If it has become an event, that is because almost nobody predicted it. For a majority of people, it was absolutely unforeseeable, except for those who planned it. They must have prepared it over a long period of time because they were equipped with high technology, were well organized, and maybe had support from some Nation-States. We don't know for the moment who was responsible for this act, but we know that, on the one hand, these people might have been stimulated by a religious fanaticism which needs to be analyzed. We have a long experience with this kind of suicidal attack. Thus, we can make a deconstructive analysis of this religious and ideological fanaticism. On the other hand, such a wel-prepared attack could not have been acted out without some national support. What we know today is that this terrorist group was composed of at least twenty people: pilots, high qualified technicians, and coordinators who had already settled in the United States. We can imagine that without the support and the reception of certain Nation-States, this wel-organized terrorist action could not have worked. From a principled point of view, we can use the human rights ethic to refer to what happened yesterday as a crime of war, although it was not war in general sense. It harms not only human rights but also the fight to wage war in a general sense, because it attacked civilians. We are entering into an era with many uncertain elements . . . . A new era begins with a new form of warfare having a certain type of technology, communications, and means as concerns the media. It is no longer a war between States, but a war of terrorist groups against the State. Around the Second World War, Carl Schmitt, a German theologian, jurist, Christian, and a Nazi, made a distinction between the war between armed partisans and the tradific~nal war between States. Today, we are entering into a new phase of war: armed partisans using high technology to make war through the Intemet and television. (Derrida 2001f)

IV. T r a c e W h a t trace is left f r o m this e n c o u n t e r o f Jacques Derrida with China? F r o m m y personal observation, I w o u l d say that Derrida's visit to China has had several positive influences on the Chinese academic circle: 1) a clearing up o f the misunderstandings concerning deconstruction existing in the Chinese reception o f Derrida's philosophy through the demonstration o f the dynamics o f deconstructive analysis o f the questions o f forgiveness, unconditional university, and capital punishment; 2) the discovery o f s o m e c o m m o n interests in issues regarding h u m a n rights, the construction o f international law, the crisis o f sovereignty, the death penalty, globalization, and cultural characteristics; 3) a stimulation o f the philosophical exchanges between E u r o p e and China; and 4) a reintroduction o f a E u r o p e a n perspective into

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that of the Chinese intellectuals already overwhelmed by American tendencies.

References

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