Logics of Alterity in Derrida’s and Deleuze’s Philosophies of Justice

Abstract

Jacques Derrida’s and Gilles Deleuze’s philosophies of justice share many similar features. For both, justice involves an overturning of law by extralegal means, made possible by an “undecidability” in the judgment-making process. To distinguish their conceptions of justice, we examine their implicit modes of non-classical reasoning with regard to “otherness,” building from Routley and Routley and Daniel Smith, to conclude that Derrida’s thinking on justice is at least paracomplete (or analetheic) while Deleuze’s is just paraconsistent (or dialetheic).

Keywords:

• Jacques Derrida
• Gilles Deleuze
• justice
• non-classical logic

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 He provides other important reasons, for instance: the decision must be made in a period of undecidability, where before it and after it the just can be determined, but not during it (Derrida, “Force” 253).

2 See Deleuze, Course 1983.11.08. Rodolphe Gasché points out that Deleuze aims for a judgment-less justice, while Derrida thinks we cannot do away with judgment altogether (Gasché 92). Nonetheless, such a judgment for Derrida remains a matter of undecidability (107).

3 Although Deleuze contrasts jurisprudence with justice rather than with law in this interview, he makes reference to the “justice system”; so perhaps he had the legal system in mind.

4 Derrida sometimes uses the term, “quasi-transcendental” (rather than “quasi-transcendent”), for instance, when speaking of the “quasi-transcendental normality” where “one is always at home at the other’s house” (Hospitality 1 196). Bennington similarly speaks of the “quasi-transcendentality” of Derrida in terms of an other that is “an absolute heterogeneity which is not external” and that allows “one term” to “rise only to fold it back immediately onto what it was beginning to dominate” (Bennington 221). With a roughly similar conception in mind, we here speak of “quasi-transcendence.” On such matters, see Stocker, “Contradiction.”

5 For convenience, we will here deal primarily with semantic rather than proof-theoretic validity. See Priest, Introduction 3–4.

6 Deleuze explicitly states here that he is against exceptions to the Law of Non-Contradiction; yet, the wording suggests it is the LEM. Either way, he is commenting on his preferences for certain logical laws, and such confusions further motivate us to find reliable interpretative methods.

7 To make the Priest and the Routley and Routley texts more typographically compatible, the symbolizations in both have been adjusted slightly.

8 Note that no aspects of the diagrams are meant to represent specific concepts such as différance but rather have a logical interpretation with regard to truth-values and truth-bearers.

9 See, for instance: Livingston; Purcell; Norris. Paul Davies, however, argues that Derrida’s seemingly dialetheic passages are only ever “ostensibly dialetheic” and Derrida really holds to classical reasoning (Davies 40). For a more detailed and extensive review of these paraconsistent studies of Derrida, see Shores, “Jc Beall’s.”

10 Elsewhere I have made the case, like I do here, that Deleuze exhibits paraconsistent or dialetheic thinking, but I do not address, like Bell does, Deleuze’s concept of difference (Shores, Logic).

11 One difficulty with applying these options to Derrida is that he possibly wants one same truth-bearer to have dually the “both true and false” and “neither true nor false” truth-values. See Derrida, Dissemination 221; “I Have” 5. Yet, these four-valued systems allow for cases that are one or the other.

12 See Beall and Restall, “Logical Pluralism” 476, 491; Logical Pluralism 29–31; Priest and Batens 3–4.

13 I would like to thank Barry Stocker, James Griffith, and the anonymous referees for contributing to this paper’s revision.