Abstracts

Carl Corleis (Bio)

The Violent Inscription of Peace: On the Necessity of the Impossible in Derrida's Thinking of the Other

In the second chapter of Aesth-ethics, Dror Pimentel shows that Derrida's talk of an unavoidable violence is more convincing than Levinas' proclamation of a non-violent relation to the Other. But if, as Derrida writes in Violence et métaphysique, there is indeed only a choice between different violences, what yardstick can be used to weigh up the violences and take sides with the lesser? And what is the point of talking about the radical other if any way of addressing it forcibly deprives it of its alterity? My presentation will be a kind of footnote to Dror Pimentel's remarks on violence, in which I will try to show that, although it is impossible to escape violent mediation and although it is impossible to properly address the Other as Other, the decisive difference for Derrida lies in whether and how the impossible relation to the Other has left its mark within the context of violence and identification. I will examine this on the basis of a discussion of Derrida's concept of the impossible as something whose necessity cannot be rejected and yet which cannot possibly be expressed in an adequate way. This impossibility is the crack in the nexus of violence, which – as a mere opening – can never be present as one of its elements, but is at the same time the condition of ethics and hospitality.