01 September 2009

Jeremy Bentham, Nonsense-Slayer

A reader has questioned this blog's snark regarding claims that Foucault was one of the "most important social theorists and philosophers" of last century, presumably along with luminaries such as Mao, Stalin and Hitler ... albeit that their importance is measured in tonnes of newsprint and dead children.

Anointment of vectors of the French Disease isn't new, as I was reminded in reading - what in my opinion is a delirious - 14 October 2004 New York Times obituary by Mark Taylor of Jacques Derrida.

Derrida was, we are told, one of the
three most important philosophers of the 20th century. No thinker in the last 100 years had a greater impact than he did on people in more fields and different disciplines. Philosophers, theologians, literary and art critics, psychologists, historians, writers, artists, legal scholars and even architects have found in his writings resources for insights that have led to an extraordinary revival of the arts and humanities during the past four decades.
Taylor comments that
To people addicted to sound bites and overnight polls, Mr. Derrida's works seem hopelessly obscure. It is undeniable that they cannot be easily summarized or reduced to one-liners. The obscurity of his writing, however, does not conceal a code that can be cracked, but reflects the density and complexity characteristic of all great works of philosophy, literature and art. Like good French wine, his works age well. The more one lingers with them, the more they reveal about our world and ourselves.
Mark Lilla, in The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York Review Books, 2001) offered a more mordant assessment, dissing Derrida as "a specimen of normalien cleverness", "more performance artist than logician", a proponent of a justice that stands "outside and beyond the law" and is accessible only through revelation ("an experience of the impossible") rather than principles ("propriety, intentionality, will, liberty, conscience, self-counciousness, the subject, the self, the person, and community") that should be forsworn by pious deconstructionists as embodiments of the "trap of language".

What cannot be articulated cannot be deconstructed, it seems, with Lilla quoting Derrida's immensely helpful announcement that
If there is deconstruction of all determining presumption of a present justice, it operates from an infinite "idea of justice", infinitely irreducible. It is irreducible because due to the Other - due to the Other before any contract, because this idea has arrived, the arrival of the Other as a singularity always Other. Invincible to all skepticism ... this "idea of justice" appears indestructible ... One can recognise, and even accuse it of madness. And perhaps another sort of mysticism. Deconstruction is mad about this sort of justice, mad with the desire for justice.
Epigones such as Lyotard are even more grotesque. It's time, time my friends, time to resuscitate Jeremy Bentham (not quite as cute as Buffy the Virilio Slayer (PDF) but oh useful as a model for grappling with substantive questions about law and justice rather than disappearing into deconstructive black holes.

Bentham might have respected the paper by Basak Cali & Alice Wyss on Why Do Democracies Comply with Human Rights Judgments? A Comparative Analysis of the UK, Ireland and Germany. It deploys "rich qualitative data based on elite interviews carried out in Germany, the UK and Ireland" in discussing whether being a democratic state matters in fulfilling international commitments. Cali & Wyss note that democracies have objective institutional properties that have different prominence in different contexts. They claim that the perceptions states have of their own democracy play an important role in determining the motivations for compliance with human rights commitments.