6 HOSPITALITY, JUSTICE AND RESPONSIBILITY A dialogue! with Jacques Derrida Q Allow me to begin with a simple question: after deconstruction, what is to be done? How do we act? Let me try and formulate this more thoroughl If there is nothing outside of the text—a much misunderstood phrase— how do we move from the text, understood in the broad sense, to action? If there is a deconstructive logic of undecidability, where an event or an action can be both/and, neither/nor, or in ethical terms both good and evil, neither good nor evil, how do we make a decision on the basis of undecidability? If we take key concepts like ‘law’, ‘truth’ and ‘lie’, and submit them to the subtlety of 100 qualifications and close readings, how can we prevent conscience making cowards of us all? In a nutshell, how do we discriminate between good and bad actions? How do we decide? How do we know what is the legitimate other that calls us to act and what is the fraud, the impostor? I JD: Your question started with the phrase ‘after deconstruction’, and I must confess I do not understand what is meant by such a phrase. Deconstruction is not a philosophy or a method, it is not a phase, a period or a moment. It is something which is constantly at work and was at work before what we call ‘deconstruction’ started, so I cannot periodize. For me there is no ‘after’ deconstruction—not that I think that deconstruction is immortal—but for what I understand under the name deconstruction, there is no end, no beginning, and no after. The next step in your question is about deconstruction and ethics, and the relation between text and action. As you well know, what I call the ‘text’ is not distinct from action or opposed to action. Of course, if you reduce a text to a book or to something that is written on pages, then perhaps there will be a problem with action. Although even a text in the form of a book, in the classical sense of something written on pages, is already something like an action. There is no action, even in the classical sense of the word, no political or ethical action which could be simply 65JACQUES DERRIDA dissociated from, or opposed to, discourse. There is no politics without discourse, there is no politics without the book in our culture. So the general frame of the question needs a re-elaboration. I would include what we call ‘action’, or ‘praxis’ or ‘polities’, within the general space of what I call ‘the trace’. Within this general space we have to distinguish between a number of determinate agencies, such as, of course, the book, the text in the narrow sense, and action. Once this has been undertaken the question of ‘undecidability’ emerges. Many of those who have written about deconstruction understand undecidability as paralysis in face of the power to decide. That is not what I would understand by ‘undecidability’. Far from opposing undecidability to decision, I would argue that there would be no decision, in the strong sense of the word, in ethics, in politics, no decision, and thus no responsibility, without the experience of some undecidability. If you don’t experience some undecidability, then the decision would simply be the application of a programme, the consequence of a premiss or of a matrix. So a decision has to go through some impossibility in order for it to be a decision. If we knew what to do, if I knew in terms of knowledge what I have to do before the decision, then the decision would not be a decision. It would simply be the application of a rule, the consequence of a premiss, and there would be no problem, there would be no decision. Ethics and politics, therefore, start with undecidability. I am in front of a problem and I know that the two determined solutions are as justifiable as one another. From that point, I have to take responsibility which is heterogeneous to knowledge. If the decision is simply the final moment of a knowing process, it is not a decision. So the decision first of all has to go through a terrible process of undecidability, otherwise it would not be a decision, and it has to be heterogeneous to the space of knowledge. If there is a decision it has to go through undecidability and make a leap beyond the field of theoretical knowledge. So when I say ‘I don’t know what to do’, this is not the negative condition of decision. It is rather the possibility of a decision. Not knowing what to do does not mean that we have to rely on ignorance and to give up knowledge and consciousness. A decision, of course, must be prepared as far as possible by knowledge, by information, by infinite analysis. At some point, however, for a decision to be made you have to go beyond knowledge, to do something that you don’t know, something which does not belong to, or is beyond, the sphere of knowledge. That is why the distinction between good and evil doesn’t depend on knowledge; that is why we should not know, in terms of knowledge, what is the distinction between good and evil. To have to make such a distinction, which depends precisely on responsibility, is, I confess, both a terrible and tragic situation in which to find oneself. Without this terrible experience, however, there would be no decision, there would simply be a serene 66HOSPITALITY, JUSTICE AND RESPONSIBILITY application of a programme of knowledge and then we could delegate decisions to scientists and theoreticians. Q: So is every decision one of fear and trembling, as in the case of Abraham? JD: Of course, if there is a decision. That is why Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling is a major text, however we interpret it. It is the moment when the general categories have to be overcome, when I am alone facing a decision. A decision is something terrible. Now I would not claim that I am sure that there is such a thing as decision. The sentence ‘I decide’, or ‘I made a decision’, or ‘I assume a responsibility’, is a scandal; it’s just good conscience. I am never sure that ‘’ made a decision in terms of a determinant judgment. It is not a theoretical judgment; I cannot be certain that ‘I’ made a decision. Not only should I not be certain that I made a good decision, but I shouldn’t even be certain that I made a decision. A decision may have happened. That is why, as I often say, and it sounds a little provocative, that ‘T never decide, that ‘I’ never make a decision in my own name, because as soon as I claim that ‘P have made a decision, you can be sure that is wrong. For a decision to be a decision, it must be made by the other in myself, which doesn’t exonerate me from responsibility. On the contrary, Tam passive in a decision, because as soon I am active, as soon as I know that ‘I’ am the master of my decision, I am claiming that I know what to do and that everything depends on my knowledge which, in turn, cancels the decision. At some point, and perhaps you were trying to provoke me, you said that if we practise close reading we will never act. On the contrary, I would assume that political, ethical and juridical responsibility requires a task of infinite close reading. I believe this to be the condition of political responsibility: politicians should read. Now, to read does not mean to spend nights in the library; to read events, to analyse the situation, to criticize the media, to listen to the rhetoric of the demagogues, that’s close reading, and it is required more today than ever. So I would urge politicians and citizens to practise close reading in this new sense, and not simply to stay in the library. In the case of Hamlet, I try to show in Specters of Marx that the responsibility in front of the father’s call, for it to be a responsibility, demands that choices be made; that is, you cannot remember everything for a fact; you have to filter the heritage and to scrutinize or make a close reading of the call. This means that to inherit, or to keep memory for a finite being implies some selection, some choice, some decision. So the son has to make a decision; even if he wants to be true to the father, or to remember the father, as a finite being he has to select within the heritage and that is again the question of undecidability. Of course, that 67